Came across the following report from TV Week:
Fox decimated the competition Wednesday night with Game 7 of the National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and Florida Marlins. It was Fox's highest-rated League Championship game ever and the highest-rated on any network in at least 10 years in adults 18 to 49 and total viewers. The baseball game gave Fox its highest-rated night in five months among adults 18 to 49 and total viewers.
I must admit, as much as I am drawn to even implicit praise of the Cubs, that I am beginning to really resent the way that sports talk inevitably drifts towards these kinds of discussions. A Cubs-BoSox series probably would have drawn record TV audiences, I know, but I really don't need to hear FOX officials telling me so. It's that kind of garbage that taints the NBA (Stern wants the Knicks/Lakers/Bulls to do well so that the ratings are high, blah blah blah) and puts the referees' integrity into question. That's not what baseball needs.
It wouild take a lot more time and space than I have here to talk about what baseball needs, and even then, I'd probably be wrong about some of it. But what we need to realize is that baseball is a fundamentally different activity than, say, football. More even than pro basketball or hockey, baseball is a long, narrative activity that its fans follow every day. There's a big difference between those of us who watch it on ESPN and those who watch it on FOX. The latter are the fans who want the Event, the dream matchup, the power primetime ratings. That stuff is great, but the fact of the matter is that baseball will never match up favorably with the Super Bowl or March Madness, at least if our criteria for that match are the one-shot, Neilsenesque, sound byte criteria that tend to obscure any other values. All it takes to realize the problems with this approach is a quick list of the quality that disappears from our networks and the crap that lasts.
Oh well. The "story" for the next two weeks will be how FOX missed out on a huge payday bc the Series is Yankees v Marlins, even though it won't be as bad as last year's Giants-Angels series in terms of ratings. And the Chumps That Be will keep working on ways to turn baseball into something that it's not, so that FOX can squeeze another $50K per 30-second slot from its advertisers. So that I can have the image of a cosmetically overhauled Fran Drescher cavorting with male models in Old Navy Painters Pants seared into my retinas. Ack.
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