Woe for baseball playoff ratings, reports Variety:

With six of Major League Baseball’s eight postseason teams hailing from major media markets, this year’s playoffs held out the hope of a ratings bonanza. Thus far, however, the results have been largely a letdown.TBS, the sole broadcaster of the four Division Series, averaged a tepid 4.2 million total viewers over the 15 MLDS games, down 22% vs. last year’s 5.4 million across 12 games.

[...]

Moreover, Goren added, these days the Yankees are not the only franchise with a coast-to-coast profile. “Five or six years ago, before the Red Sox had their run, if the Yankees got eliminated, you thought, Oh boy, we’re in trouble.” But with teams such as Boston and the Cubs having accumulated national profiles, he said, “The sport is so much healthier today.”

[...]

On a more promising note: With the Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays in this year’s league showdowns in addition to the Dodgers, this year is the first since 1999 that four top-13 markets comprise MLB’s final quartet.

[...]

With the hapless Cubs now out of it, a Bosox-Dodgers Series is now perceived as the dream World Series matchup.

read the rest here.

Mediaweek reports that our fondness for watching NFL on the tube is even greater than last year:

Through the first four weeks of the season, ESPN’s Monday Night Football has shown the biggest ratings bump, averaging 13 million viewers per telecast, up 20 percent versus last season. NBC’s Sunday Night Football is averaging 17.8 million viewers, up 4 percent. For all its Sunday games, national and regional, CBS is averaging 15.8 million viewers, up 3 percent, while Fox is averaging 15.2 million for all games, up 1 percent.

Read the full story

The friendly confines of Wrigley Field didn’t seem so friendly to the Cubs, and TBS must be hoping for a miracle that stretches this series out to five games…or at least four. The Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Chicago Cubs game drew the most viewers of any of the game ones, with 5.381 million average viewers for game one.  The Boston Red Sox vs. the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim was the next most watched, with 4.442 million.

In fairness, of game one, not all of the difference in the lead is the markets.  The game one for the Milwaukee Brewers vs. Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago White Sox vs. the Tampa Bay Rays both took place during the daytime.

Here are the Nielsen numbers for all the game ones of the Division Series round of the playoffs. As of this writing we haven’t seen any of the game two numbers:

Source: The Nielsen Company

As our historical ratings chart shows, the trend is definitely not baseball’s friend, but significant year to year fluctuations occur based on matchups, cities and number of games played.

In 2007, TBS carried 13 divisional series games and TNT carried 4, I averaged their results together.

2006-7 data is Live+SD, prior years are Live viewing.

You can find World Series data here.

National League Championship Series TV Ratings 1976-2007

————————-

American League Championship Series TV Ratings 1976-2007

-
Nielsen TV Ratings Data: ©2008 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.

The hand-wringing must already be starting among the executives at Fox Sports. While Los Angeles is a bigger market than Chicago, Fox must be praying for a World Series that features the Cubs vs. the Red Sox. While there are two teams from the Los Angeles Market in the playoffs, neither the Dodgers and certainly not the Angels of Anaheim, would be as large of a ratings draw nationally as a potential Cubs/Red Sox matchup.

Read the full story

From an ESPN press release:

ESPN Wins Prime Time among All Key Male Demos for Fourth Straight Week
ESPN.com NFL Content Yields 10.9 Million Visits & 74.8 Million Page Views

ESPN’s Monday Night Football – the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 23-20 overtime victory over the visiting Baltimore Ravens – earned an 8.8 rating, representing an average of 8,595,000 homes (11,783,000 P2+).  For the fourth straight Monday, ESPN won the night in the key male demos among all networks, broadcast or cable, and the game drove significant traffic to ESPN.com’s NFL content.

For the NFL season to date, ESPN’s Monday Night Football is averaging a 9.6 rating and 9,335,000 households (12,972,000 P2+), up 14%, 15% and 20%, respectively from last season through five games (8.4 rating; 8,117,000 homes; 10,767,000 viewers).  For 2008, the five Monday Night Football telecasts represent cable’s five biggest audiences of the year. 

ESPN’s presentation of the “game around the game,” which included NFL studio programming starting at 3:30 p.m. ET through the conclusion of NFL Primetime at 2:40 a.m., delivered 19.1  gross household coverage ratings for its MNF coverage.

ESPN.com

Also, NFL content on ESPN.com, including “Monday Night Surround,” accessed via computers and mobile devices generated 10.9 million visits and nearly 74.8 million page views – an increase of 41% from the same week last year – from Monday through Tuesday at noon.  For the season to date, ESPN.com is averaging 87.5 million page views, up 50% from 2007.

In addition, during the same period there were nearly 4.4 million views of pro football-related video on ESPN.com and SportsCenter Right Now was viewed some 1.6 million times.  Also, in the past week (Tuesday through Monday) ESPN football-related podcasts were downloaded more than 740,000 times.

Robert and I both believe that live events like sports will become relatively more valuable in the future because they are more “DVR-proof”. It seems as if the head of content at ESPN agrees (via MediaWeek):

ESPN’s content guru John Skipper says he is going to make a concerted effort to add even more live sports coverage across all of the network’s media platforms while cutting back on scripted series, reality shows, original movies and other types of more general sports entertainment programming.

“We have found that what sports fans really care about, and why they come to ESPN properties is to watch live games,” said Skipper, the company’s vp of content. ESPN’s Sept. 16 Monday Night Football telecast drew 18.6 million viewers, the largest cable audience ever.

Skipper said he will continue to pursue deals for more major college games, and will look to get additional rights to major professional tennis and golf events when they become available. Reclaiming the National Hockey League is also on his to-do list. The NHL is slated to run on Versus through the 2010-2011 season.

Of course, Skipper’s biggest quarry is the Olympics; Skipper is working on a major pitch on behalf of ESPN and sister network ABC to wrest the Olympics’ rights away from NBC when the bidding for the ’14 and ’16 Games come up next year. As the incumbent, NBC will have some advantages. And after its success in Beijing, it’s not going to give up without a fight. Skipper, without offering specifics, said “we are pretty good at finding ways to acquire rights to major events if we want them.”

Read the rest here.

I haven’t caught the MMA (mixed martial arts) bug yet, but nor do I have anything against it. I did check it out the first time EliteXC ran in primetime on CBS on Saturday, May 31, 2008. And I did watch the Kimbo Slice explode James Thompson’s cauliflower ear. It was completely disgusting!

Many will claim that Slice is not the best at MMA, even within EliteXC which many MMA enthusiasts seem to consider an inferior league. I don’t know enough to comment on his talents relative to the field, but when it comes to ratings in primetime for EliteXC the event with Kimbo beat the snot out of the one without him. It’s only two data points, but this Saturday October 4, when EliteXC again airs on primetime for CBS, Kimbo Slice will be back.

Some have expressed shock at CBS airing these events at all. But I don’t for a couple of reasons. First of all, Saturday night is typically a barren wasteland for the broadcast networks, especially within younger age demographics. Last night for example, even with NCAA football, no broadcast network averaged even a 2.0 rating (a full ratings point = one percent of the population being measured). Also, EliteXC is a partnership between Showtime Networks and ProElite, Inc. Showtime is owned by CBS.

In total viewers, the initial event which featured Kimbo Slice on May 31, ran well past 11pm (11:51pm) with the whole Slice/Thompson battle being on after 11pm and it averaged 4.851 million viewers. Not huge numbers when it came to totals, but the age/gender demo performance was much better.

The July 26 event (which ran from 9pm-11:02pm) averaged 2.571 million. So in total viewers, the difference was nearly 100%, but it was much greater than 100% in some key demos. I learned a couple of things in this process - XC is short for “extreme combat” and surprisingly (to me, anyway) young men are not alone in their love for Kimbo Slice, young women seem to like him too. Here’s the data:

Nielsen Ratings Data: ©2008 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved