The National Pastime? Hardly. 2019 World Series posts four of the ten worst TV ratings in history

… Sunday Night Football decimated it

A few years ago, Donald Trump tried to destroy the National Football League.

He failed — and on Sunday night, Trump witnessed his first Washington Nationals game and saw first-hand how far Major League Baseball has fallen. He attended Game 5 between the Nationals and the Houston Astros, and the game became the fifth lowest-rated World Series game in history.

Fox broadcast had a rating of 6.5 and trailed NBC’s broadcast of the Green Bay Packers-Kansas City Chiefs by about 60 percent.

The World Series thus far has recorded four of the lowest-rated games in history.

As Sports Media Watch noted after Sunday’s game,

Already on a record-low pace, World Series ratings were hammered by the NFL Sunday night.

Sunday’s Astros-Nationals World Series Game 5 averaged a 6.5 rating and 11.39 million viewers on FOX, marking the lowest-rated and least-watched Game 5 of the Fall Classic on record. The previous lows were a 7.3 and 12.64 million for Royals-Giants in 2014.

This year’s World Series accounts for the lowest-rated and least-watched Game 2, Game 4 and Game 5.

Paulsen, “World Series Game 5 hits lows for non-Saturday game,” Oct. 29, 2019

Part of that is because the Yankees and Dodgers are not in it, taking out the New York and L.A. markets. In addition, Washington does not have a long-term fan base.

The reality is that the Packers-Chiefs game was one of the best SNF games this season, perhaps in a few years, and the overall ratings for the NFL are up significantly this year — as they were last season.

Attendance has been a long-time problem

However, does this mean that baseball is dying? Attendance was down again this season, but does that matter? A New York Times headline said this after the season,

“Baseball Saw a Million More Empty Seats. Does It Matter?”

The story told the tale,

The 2019 season will be remembered as the year of the home run, when baseballs flew out of stadiums at a historic rate. But in front offices across the sport, it will also be remembered as yet another season when attendance continued to dwindle, spurring teams to think up evermore inventive ways to get hard-core and casual fans alike to attend games.

Danielle Allentuck and Kevin Draper, New York Times, Sept. 29, 2019

Problems go beyond the World Series — games too long and boring

The good news for MLB is that Game 7 could see the largest audience in this year’s World Series. However, as a national columnist notes, to keep the audience interested, the games have to be more interesting — which means shorter,

It is because I love baseball so much that I want it to appeal to the largest possible audience in order to keep the game healthy and successful. You start losing people to four-hour games, and that doesn't help anyone. Yes, the die-hard fans will stay no matter what, but remaining a healthy and successful game means appealing to new generations of fans.

Matt Snyder, “Long World Series games with late endings are a problem 

that can and should be fixed,” Washington Post, Oct. 26, 2018

Snyder wrote this after Game 3. He noted that the length of games was already a record,

Game 1

It was a Tuesday. It started at 8:08 p.m. ET and lasted three hours and 43 minutes.

That gets us an end time of nine minutes till midnight. Imagine this hypothetical casual fan lives in the Eastern time zone and has to wake up at 5:30 a.m. Are we reeling that fan in? I've even talked to die-hards who say they simply can't stay up that late on a weeknight.

Game 2

On a Wednesday with a first pitch of 8:08 p.m. ET, the game lasted four hours and one minute. Yes, we're past midnight Eastern. Even in the Central time zone it's after 11.

On a weeknight, that's not great. Our saving grace here was the Nationals put this thing to bed in the seventh, but even then it wasn't exactly an early night.

Game 3

It was a Friday, so that's good! More people are willing to stay up late. Good thing because we definitely needed that. It ended at 12:10 a.m. ET.

We're only through three games, and this series has set a record. Per Baseball-Reference, this is the first World Series ever to have two four-hour, nine-inning games. Already!

Snyder, “Long World Series games with late endings are a problem 

that can and should be fixed,” Washington Post, Oct. 26, 2018

So, watching a Packers-Chiefs game, even without the youngest and biggest draw for millennials, KC QB Patrick Mahones, still is a greater draw even though that game was more than three hours long — but infinitely more interesting.

The elderly columnist George Will, who knows about declining popularity, still argues that baseball is the national pastime. However, it is probably less popular than the NFL, college football, NCAA March Madness, and even the NHL.

And with these numbers, it is not likely to change.