Through the first two days of Major League Baseball playoffs, TBS has seen its best ratings of the season. You can see full details on Wednesdays' first day results.
This doesn't include last night, but Broadcasting & Cable has some more data on the first two days of playoff games on TBS for Wednesday and Thursday:
St. Louis continued to be a powerhouse MLB market, as Game 2 of the Cardinals/Dodgers series (won by Los Angeles 3-2) averaged an 18.3 rating in the market, the highest-rated of the six MLB cities in action last night. The Phillies, who lost to Colorado 5-4 in Game 2 Thursday, averaged a 15.2 rating for Game 2 in the Philadelphia market. Game 1 of the Red Sox/Angels series (won by Los Angeles 5-0), earned a 13.2 in Boston and an 8.0 in Los Angeles.
Through two days, the postseason has seen significant growth across all key demos, with the biggest increase (19%) coming among men 18-34, with 690,000 tuning in. Among adults 18-49, viewership is up 9% to 2 million.
Phillies at Rockies snowed out today. Looks like four games on Sunday if the Cardinals manage a win.
I hope the Cardinals win because I want the maximum number of games. For the same reason, I’ll root for the Red Sox and Twins tomorrow.
And a pretty good read from Maury Brown:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yz9ag3n
This year’s playoffs suck for some reason. Maybe its the teams that made it.
Playoffs are great this year!
Hoping for Dodgers v Rockies
And Yankees v Angels
And that’s looking quite possible!
A mixed blessing today.
I have to think that the broadcasters are happy that the Dodgers made it on to the next Round, but obviously they would have preferred to have gotten another game or two out of that first Round matchup.
Big loss for TBS. The Cards not advancing to the NLCS will hurt the ratings. St. Louis was a powerhouse market for TBS as stated above. TBS better hope for a LA vs. Phillies NLCS. Rockies vs. LA will not have as much drawing power.
Jrock, the bigger loss, BY FAR, is that the series only went 3 games vs. 5. As for the next round, don’t kid yourself, the Dodgers are a bigger ratings draw than the Cardinals, but again the number of games will matter far more than the matchup.
The local ratings cited above can be deceiving, even in the local markets, more people watched in LA than St. Louis.
Its true a higher % of the St. Louis market watched than the percentage of people watching in LA, but the LA market is 4.5 times as big as St. Louis.
An 8 rating in LA is ~450,000 homes. An 18.3 rating in St. Louis is around 230,000 homes.
Thanks guys for clearing that up. I wasn’t figuring in the market size. It is a shame that the Cards vs. Dodgers series didn’t go 5.
cardinals lost
I think we’ll see LA vs. LA in the world series this year. Would that be good or bad for the ratings?
I’m thinking Phillies vs. LA both in the NLCS and the World Series
Dennis, that would probably be bad, like when it was the Mets vs Yankees.
No surprise at the strong ratings for baseball’s post season. But the commentators for the Yankees/Twin series, especially Chip Caray has been horrible. Factual/stat errors, even the calls he’s making on live plays are wrong. Plus, I don’t know that the TBS techs actually understand why replays are important. And who decided where the camera’s are placed? There have been several plays when we couldn’t see where the ball went, the cameras lost the ball in the corners. Really shoddy work.
Dennis,
While I too would love LA vs LA, that would be far from the ideal matchup for it’s ratings potential. I’m sure that the broadcasters are already disappointed that the Angels beat the Red Sox. I’m not sure how many viewers that the Angels bring, but I seriously doubt that it’s as many as the Red Sox would have.
Las Vegas predicted STL vs NYY but cards are gone so that’s not going to happen although that would be and AMAZING game