MLB's Viewership Dilemma

How the league's approaching dual crises of baseball-watching

First off, a well-deserved congrats to the Texas Rangers, winners of their first-ever World Series in their 63-year history. They won this series emphatically.

But I’m driven to start with a quiz today. How much of the World Series did you actually watch?

Go ahead, no judgment here. I missed a good bit. In fact, I was watching my fiancée Laura and the North Brooklyn Baddies win their beach volleyball league championship last night when the Rangers broke the game open.

I regret nothing. Go Baddies.

The problem for MLB is, I wasn’t alone. And most people didn’t have a beach volleyball match instead, possibly because it’s now November.

One thing that all the critics of baseball’s playoff format were assuredly right about was that the casual fan wouldn’t care about this World Series matchup.

Correct! A lot of fans didn’t. For all my advocating for what I’m going to call the You Still Have To Win The Games defense, I can recognize the issue here.

Things got off to an inauspicious start when Game 1 — easily the best game in the series, featuring a 9th-inning comeback and an 11th-inning walk-off — broke new ground as the least-watched World Series game in history. Like, ever. Yikes.

9.35 million people tuned in across Fox’s various properties, including its streaming service. That’s bad, and a precipitous drop from last year, when Game 1 between the Phillies and Astros had about 2 million more people watching.

Things didn’t improve over the rest of the series, which of course couldn’t have been helped by the 4-1 deciding margin. You thought 9.35 million was bad? Try 8.13, and that was Game 3, when the series was still tied up. Double yikes.

Now, it’s not all bad. Ratings for the league championship series — the semifinals, for the uninitiated — hit their highest marks since 2018 as both series went the distance with Game 7s, and postseason ratings overall jumped 7% from last year.

So that’s good. Still, it’s an undeniable problem for the league, and the entertainment product it’s responsible for marketing, when trees this size fall in sparsely attended forests.

Acronym Soup

And that’s not even the only viewership problem on their docket.

MLB’s other nemeses of the moment are two more three-letter acronyms — DSG and RSN — Diamond Sports Group, a prominent Regional Sports Network, which declared bankruptcy earlier this year.

That Chapter 11 filing led the league to take its contingency measures up to an 11 too. They hastily picked up the production and distribution rights to the San Diego Padres and the NL Champion Arizona Diamondbacks after DSG bowed out.

Now, they’re demanding more lead time if they’re going to have to do that again.

DSG still holds the broadcast rights for 12 teams, but their RSN empire has fallen victim to tectonic shifts in the cable TV business model they long relied on to pay the bills. Cords have been cut, and so have revenues.

It’s not clear who DSG will be showing next year, which MLB — I’d say understandably — takes issue with.

“At the moment, MLB and the clubs can only guess which clubs the debtors may continue to support and which may be left without a telecast partner. Merely guessing is not good enough,” the league said. 

MLB isn’t saying it out loud here, but what they’re saying to themselves is: hey, we’ll take them. Sounds like an opportunity. We’d love to provide a league-spanning streaming package under one banner, namely ours.

There are roadblocks, though. Even as DSG crumbles, not every RSN has fallen off with it.

Five of the most valuable and iconic franchises in the sport — the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Cubs, and Dodgers — either own their RSNs themselves or get sizable payouts out of them every year.

They don’t have any reason right now to follow the league’s lead. Per ESPN:

“… as one high-ranking official for a large-market team said: ‘Without us, there's nobody buying the package.’

What might sound like big-market arrogance is instead a truth that smaller-market owners acknowledge -- and fear. An MLB streaming package without the game's most popular teams isn't much of a streaming package at all. The larger markets know this, and they are ready to leverage it, with one official saying: ‘We'll never give up our rights.’”

So — good luck with that.

And that’s before we address whether a unified streaming product would approach the viewership numbers MLB’s regular season gets today.

Welcome innovations like the pitch clock probably won’t be enough to spur conversion en masse to an app unfamiliar to a lot of longtime fans.

I realize this sounds antiquated, but a lot of viewers might not be viewers anymore when they can’t just turn on the TV and see their team.

That’s a real issue for the league too, and one it will take time to solve. Expect a long tail to the disruptions we see happening today.

Despite all this, baseball remains in strong financial shape. Record-low playoff ratings may point one direction, but record-high league revenue points the other way.

The priority for MLB will be trying to align the two in the right direction. Let’s see how they do.

Also, This

• I reached the end of this and realized I’d barely even talked about the champion Texas Rangers, so here are their flowers: both the brand-new and long-established talent on this team delivered. Nathan Eovaldi remains a playoff warrior, and I’ve already mentioned — through gritted Cardinals fan teeth — how great Jordan Montgomery looked.

  • Repeated playoff hero Adolis Garcia also stung a little, as this team won with a tried-and-true formula: hit a lot of homers, win a lot of games. Corey Seager, take a bow.

    • They could be back, especially if their young guys keep getting better. Don’t bet against Bruce Bochy.
      

• Speaking of volleyball and viewers, a record number of people tuned in to watch Nebraska vs. Minnesota last week. 1.66 million ain’t nothing.

  • Women’s college sports continue climbing in popularity, to the vindication of a great many people who took them to be under-marketed for a long time now.
    

• The NFL usually doesn’t have the same kind of seismic trade deadlines that we see in other sports, and that was true this year too, though we did some get fun ones, including:

  • DE Chase Young to the 49ers, a shiny new toy for a talented group in the trenches. If Brock Purdy can get right again, this team has all the makings.

  • CB Rasul Douglas to the ailing Bills, who need all the secondary help they can get if they want to stay in the Super Bowl picture.

  • QB Josh Dobbs to the plucky and suddenly Cousins-less Vikings, who could maybe still compete without him? I doubt it, but I respect the move.
    

• Even in the NBA, most of the action doesn’t wait for the deadline anymore, and that was certainly true this week as we saw the inimitable James Harden get his way yet again. Welcome to the Clippers. I’m sure this will work out.