You could look at it a couple of ways. Either a number of Cubs fans have switched their alliances to the White Sox since 2003, or the combination of putting a playoff game exclusively on cable and starting it at 9 p.m. resulted in a big drop in the local ratings.
Just a guess, but we’ll go with the latter.
In the no surprise department, the area rating for Game 1 of the Cubs-Arizona on TBS was off 38 percent compared with the opener of the Cubs-Atlanta division series in 2003.
Wednesday night’s game did an 18.1 rating; 1 local ratings point is worth 34,450 homes.
More than 630,000 households stayed up late to watch Lou Piniella take out Carlos Zambrano early. That’s still a huge audience, more than three times larger than for a regular-season game.
However, the last time the Cubs opened in the playoffs, they did a 28.9 rating with 40 percent of the local televisions tuned into the game. That game aired on Fox nationally and on WFLD-Ch. 32 in Chicago. It began at a more inviting 7 p.m.
Inevitably, there had to be a decline in the rating. With 15 percent of the Chicago market not wired for cable or satellite, the game couldn’t be viewed by as many people. And with the game beginning at bedtime for most kids and even some adults, the game was going to lose viewers who preferred sleep to baseball.
Regardless, TBS was more than pleased. Nationally, the Cubs game did a 4.0 rating with 5.13 million viewers tuning in to a game that started at 10 p.m. in the East. That beats the numbers for those “Sex and the City” reruns.
TBS has taken a lot of misplaced blame for the starts of the first two Cubs-Arizona games. The responsibility falls on Major League Baseball.
“Television does whatever the league tells it to do,” said Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS Sports who now has his own consulting firm. “If they wanted to play all the World Series games in the afternoon, the networks would say, ‘OK, here is what it’s worth.'”
Obviously, the games are worth more in prime time, and baseball has profited nicely. Also, more people have been able to watch those big games at night. And two night games are better than one.
The doubleheader enabled TBS to be the most watched cable network Wednesday with more than 5 million viewers tuning in. Of course, TBS paid a premium for that rating.
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