On Sept. 30, a sold-out Kaufman Stadium and the rowdy crowd cheered for its Kansas City Royals in the playoffs for the first time since 1985. The Oakland Athletics were up 7-3, but the Royals rallied back to win the game in extra innings.
You would think that people at home would be glued to their television set, right?
Wrong.
The American League Wild Card Game drew a 3.3 final rating, according to Sportsmediawatch.com. The MLB postseason games are fantastic, but the television ratings show that the public at large still has no interest.
To put things in perspective, last Thursday night’s regular season game between the NFL’s New England Patriots and New York Jets registered an 11.3 rating.
The NLCS between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals registered a 4.3 rating, according to NetworkPressRelease.com
So why isn’t anyone watching?
Part of the reason is because the games are on too many different cable networks. Those include the MLB Network, Fox Sports One, Fox 11 and TBS. ESPN radio personality Colin Cowherd talked two weeks ago on his daily radio show “In the Heard” about how its hard to find the games.
“Baseball makes all this money, but they got their playoff games on seven different channels,” Cowherd said.
Cowherd pointed out that baseball games overlap each other if they go extra innings, and the public would miss an hour of the next game.
A retirement community in the Bay Area gathered together to watch the San Francisco Giants take on the Washington Nationals. There was one problem: the elderly couldn’t find the game anywhere on TV, according to an article in The San Francisco Chronicle.
The old folks were out of luck until a worker called the cable company for a quick fix.
“An associate and I were able to negotiate a deal (probably not such a good one) to get the game and the channel instantly for an additional $18/month,” a worker at the retirement community told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that its sports desk fielded over 150 calls from fans trying to find a playoff game on TV.
The ratings are getting significantly worse and don’t seem to be getting any better in the future.
Last year’s World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Boston Red Sox, teams both with a rich baseball tradition, had the fourth worst ratings of all time, according to Forbes.
Financially, baseball is doing just fine. In 2012 the Dodgers sold for $2 billion.
During an ESPN conference call in April, before the game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, MLB commissioner Bud Selig said he believes there is more money to be made.
“I have hopes for $9 billion. I don’t know that we’ll make that this year, but we may,” Selig said. “If this sport continues to make the progress at all levels… it can go a lot higher.”
Baseball teams make a ton of money because they play a 162-game season. That is 81 home games that they can make money off of. The problem is that the games last too long and people in America would rather find something else to do.
In today’s society we want the updates and scores now. The public has things to do, places to be and doesn’t want to spend hours watching baseball. On Aug. 10, a game between the Angels and Red Sox lasted 18 innings. The duration of the game was six hours and 31 minutes.
Speeding up the game won’t help much because that would require changing the rules and structure of the game. However, there are a couple things that MLB can tweak to grab the public’s interest.
Baseball season starts in March with 30 preseason games, 162 regular season games and the playoffs going on during the first week of October. Reducing the preseason and regular season by 15 games and pushing the season back a month so the season ends in late July would take away some distraction of football season and allow fans to focus more on baseball’s postseason.
Instead of watching bad football teams like the Oakland Raiders and Jacksonville Jaguars in the preseason, baseball fans can turn their attention to baseball playoffs.
The second thing the baseball organizations can do is expand the playoffs to six teams instead of having only five. This way, all the teams will play at the same time.
Changing the playoff format to a system where six teams from the AL and NL make the playoffs, and the two top teams from each conference getting a first round bye, would allow baseball fans to watch the first round would be the best three-out-of-five. The second and third round and the World Series would be four-out-of-seven.
This format would allow more teams that are average or below average a chance at the postseason. The public is interested in playoffs.
This new playoff format would get the public’s attention because for once the games won’t overlap with football season. Baseball will not surpass football in popularity, but gaining ground is certainly a possibility.