It is hard to imagine things could have gone any worse for TBS during the playoffs.
Four of the five series it covered were sweeps. The fifth saw the Cleveland Indians beating the Yankees in four games.
Looking at the potential of having the Cubs and Philadelphia in the National League Championship Series, a potential blockbuster from a ratings standpoint, TBS was stuck with Colorado and Arizona, two 1990s expansion teams with little or no fan identification outside of their own cities and states.
Because Colorado and Arizona are based in the West, Major League Baseball designated two of the games for 9 p.m. (Central time) starts, giving fans out East another excuse not to tune in.
To top things off, TBS’ studio show and announcer teams, from Chip Caray to Cal Ripken, were ripped almost as unmercifully as the Cubs were in Chicago after the Diamondbacks swept them.
The perfect storm led to TBS having the lowest ratings of all time for a league championship series. Game 2 had an all-time low rating of 2.2; 1 national ratings point is worth more than 1 million homes.
Game 3 jumped to a 3.5, but that paled in comparison to the 5.7 rating Fox did for Game 2 of the Cleveland-Boston series.
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TBS will point out it did decent numbers for the first-round games. However, the network didn’t get enough of them. Sweeps are killers for television. Audiences build in competitive series that eventually go the full route. TBS never even got close.
TBS, obviously, was hoping for much, much more in its first season of covering postseason baseball. The only consolation for the network is the knowledge it can go nowhere but up in 2008.
As for the remainder of the postseason, how much is Fox pulling for Boston to win the American League Championship Series?
You can be sure the prospect of a Cleveland-Colorado World Series has the network executives extremely jittery.
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