TV execs, MLB hope for big playoffs
TEXT OF STORY
Steve Chiotakis: Professional baseball’s league championship series are underway. And the Major League’s got to be pleased that the remaining teams play in three of the four biggest TV markets in this country. But even that may not be enough to help baseball’s declining ratings, as reporter Joel Rose explains.
Joel Rose: Officials at Fox, the network that will broadcast the World Series, are probably hoping for a rematch between two of baseball’s oldest rivals: the Yankees and the Dodgers.
Vin Scully: But it’s no longer a subway series. The Dodgers, once located in Brooklyn, now belong to Los Angeles.
The two teams have met in the World Series 11 times over the years. They also happen to play in the country’s two biggest media markets.
Robert Siedman: Yankees-Dodgers from a ratings and market perspective would be huge.
Robert Seidman co-writes the blog “TV by the Numbers.” No matter which teams get to the fall classic, Seidman says TV executives will be rooting for a long and dramatic playoffs.
Seidman: More than markets, what matters to the TV networks in the end is volume, so more games is better.
Seidman says ratings from the first round of the playoffs were encouraging. But he doubts that even a Yankees-Dodgers series would reverse decades of declining viewership for the World Series. Last year’s match-up between Tampa Bay and Philadelphia was the lowest rated ever.
I’m Joel Rose for Marketplace.
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