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Fox may yet love NY series
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October 24, 2001: 4:05 p.m. ET
If there's a Game 7, Yanks' return to Series won't be ratings poison.
A twice weekly column by Staff Writer Chris Isidore
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NEW YORK (CNNmoney) - With the new television season getting underway, this is not when the networks want to be airing reruns.
But Saturday, when Fox broadcasts the first game of the World Series, one of the two teams will be the New York Yankees for the fourth straight year, and the fifth in the last six.
Last year's series hit an all-time low for television ratings, as most of the nation tuned out of the all-New York Yankees-Mets contest. This year the Yanks are matched up against the Arizona Diamondbacks, a four-year old franchise with virtually no fans outside of the Valley of the Sun.
Still, executives with Fox Entertainment Group Inc. (FOX: Research, Estimates) insist this can be a good contest for the network, even if there are more baseball fans who hate the Yankees than love them.
"The Yankees are a good draw," said Lou D'Ermilio, spokesman for Fox Sports. "Anytime you can have a national team, like the Dallas Cowboys in their heyday, the Los Angeles Lakers -- people from all over the country may not cheer for them, but they want to watch."
New York City has gotten a warmer, even heroic, portrayal in the rest of the country since the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, but D'Ermilio is probably right when he says he doubts that has mitigated the feelings of the legions of Yankee haters.
"I think there's probably a lot more people in the country who love New York. I don't know if they love the Yankees," he said.
However, the real reason the Yankees have been bad for World Series ratings has less to do with fan allegiances or their feeling about New York and much more to do with the team's dominance of each series.
In the last three years the Yankees' opponents have only managed to win a total of one game, in Game 3 last year. Four- and five-game series would likely be bad news for broadcasters, even if the match-up was the Chicago Cubs vs. the Boston Red Sox, two teams with huge followings nationwide but few fans who were alive for their team's most recent championships more than 80 years ago.
"The longer the series goes, the more competitive it is, and means more than just in the markets involved," said Vince Wladika, spokesman for Major League Baseball.
The ratings prove that out. Since 1991, each successive game of the World Series has generally had a better rating than the game before it. The high-water mark was the 32.2 rating for Game 7 of the 1991 series between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves. But there has only been one other Game 7 since, in 1997.
This year's match-up does have the potential to produce that kind of drama. The Arizona team has two of the game's best pitchers, Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, who could very well give the Yankees team trouble.
The rest of the Arizona pitching is more suspect, limiting the Diamondbacks' chance of turning the table and dominating the three-time champion Yankees.
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Legions of Yankees haters probably are sick of watching the team in the World Series, but Fox could still do well in the ratings if the Diamondbacks can push the three-time champions to a seventh game. | |
Even if the rights agreement between Fox and baseball means Fox loses money on the series once again this year, Fox is likely going to see better ratings by airing the World Series than its normal programming.
Fox's top rated shows, such as "Temptation Island," "The Simpsons" and "Malcolm in the Middle" all get lower average ratings than even last year's anemic World Series viewership, which pulled down an average 12.4 rating nationwide.
And the postseason gives Fox a chance to hype some of its new programs endlessly, such as "24," its new drama that debuts after baseball is done.
Despite the viewers baseball is able to deliver, Fox often seems like a reluctant broadcast partner to the game, which is particularly interesting for a company that owns its own team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
When Fox agreed earlier this year to sell its Fox Family channel to Walt Disney Co. (DIS: Research, Estimates), Disney executives disclosed that Fox insisted that Disney take the midweek regular season games and some of the postseason games now shown on the cable network as part of the deal.
Last Tuesday Fox slated Game 1 of the National League Championship Series for 4 p.m. ET on a Tuesday so it could air two sitcoms and a romance/reality show in their normal primetime slot.
"We've already launched our Tuesday night entertainment lineup," said D'Ermilio. "We're a company with multiple constituencies."
Respectable numbers for that midweek afternoon game, coupled with ratings from this past Saturday in which the 4 p.m. game outdrew the 8 p.m. game, bring into question the often-stated argument by broadcasters and baseball that as much of the postseason as possible must be put on starting at 8 p.m. ET in order to attract the greatest number of viewers, even if it means most kids and even many adults in the East can't stay awake for the end of the games.
Click here for CNNSI's coverage of the 2001 baseball postseason
Even if ratings are a bit lower now, 4 p.m. ET Saturday World Series games would build up interest in a new generation of fans that could go a long way to stem the steady decline in ratings of recent years. 
Click here to send mail to Chris Isidore
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