Patrons watch the Blue Jays at St. Louis Bar and Grill in downtown Toronto last week.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
The topline of ESPN’s story about this year’s World Series ratings was what you’d expect. Numbers have dropped. Blame Canada.
American viewership is down 14 per cent year over year (14.55 million versus 12.5 million).
Considering that last year’s World Series featured the two biggest media markets in the U.S. – New York and Los Angeles – it’s actually a lot better than you’d have thought.
Maybe this is the power of Shohei Ohtani. Maybe people are just in the mood for baseball.
You have to get a little lower in the story before the you find the interesting part – that the total numbers for this series are off the charts.
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If you combine the U.S., Canada and Japan, total viewership for the World Series opener was 32.6 million.
According to Major League Baseball, that is the highest combined number since the Cubs played Cleveland in 2016, and that was the Game 7 in which Chicago ended its 108-year run of World Series frustration.
Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani walks to the dugout against the Toronto Blue Jays during the fifth inning in Game 4, on Tuesday.Brynn Anderson/The Associated Press
That’s probably the biggest baseball game of the century. And Toronto versus L.A. in a series opener in which one team was supposed to crush the other has surpassed it.
Almost as many Japanese as Americans are watching these games (11.8 million for Game 1). Despite having a tenth of the U.S. population, Canada has more than half their baseball audience (7 million).
ESPN spun this as a bad news story – “World Series viewers drop 14 per cent in U.S. for first two games.” That’s only if you accept American absolutism, or if you’re trying to stick it to the American broadcaster, Fox.
No smart league does that. Everybody wants to be big in Japan, and the U.K., and China and Brazil. That is the only way to thrive.
As this is written, before Game 5, this World Series is shaping up as a minor classic on the field. It could be a major classic by Saturday.
Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hits a single during the ninth inning of Game 4. against the Dodgers.Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Reuters
But where its real impact may be felt is in outlook. Baseball is having its first truly international World Series. It’s just three countries, but that’s two more countries than they’re used to.
If this is possible, maybe the idea of baseball becoming a truly international game, like soccer, isn’t as far-fetched as it might have seemed a decade ago.
Someone should let ESPN know.
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Meanwhile, up in Canada, Rogers is having trouble turning their good news story into good PR.
The Sportsnet+ streaming service crashed during Tuesday night’s Game 4. And not during a one-two-three inning, but in the seventh. That’s when the Jays were up a run with two men on base about to bust the thing open. Maybe you saw the highlights later.
Has someone checked if ESPN has access to the control room?
The only downside to going to a big event is that you don’t get to watch them on TV. I maintain my unpopular position that sports is best enjoyed at home, in front of a big screen, where there’s no line-up for the bathroom, and a bottle of water won’t cost you 14 bucks.
Coming to Dodger Stadium must be the most onerous ‘entertainment’ experience on Earth. You have to drive through bad traffic to get to terrible, soul-sucking traffic. Then you have to do it again on the way out, and it’s even worse. When media leaves, typically two hours after the last pitch, it’s still bumper-to-bumper in every direction.
The spots near the gates in the cheap lots are so coveted that you’ll find cars lined up at them five, six hours ahead of these World Series games. I’m not talking three or four cars. I’m talking dozens.
Once here, you must very literally fight your way through the crowd. When they designed this place, I don’t think it occurred to them that the narrow exterior concourses would someday be jammed up with food kiosks and souvenir stands. If you have a fear of being trapped in large groups, I’d scratch this one off your bucket list.
To come here requires a sky high tolerance for inconvenience. Bizarrely, this equates to the highest average attendance in baseball.
Maybe it’s because this is so foreign to the American consumer experience that people think of it as a sort of consumerist crucible. ‘I survived the Dodgers game, and have the 85 dollar t-shirt to prove it’. In fairness, the Dodgers do merchandise better than anyone else.
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TV is meant to be the solution to this problem – low cost, highly convenient, the game being spoon fed to you by experts. No need to think too hard. Just lie back, scroll your phone and look up when Buck Martinez’s voice starts to rise.
Nobody can bear anything that requires long, close attention any more. I have a theory that this is why hockey can’t break through. Not enough breaks.
Baseball is perfect amusement for a distracted age. Even the fans at a World Series game are scrolling their phones by the third inning, and they’re not missing anything.
On Tuesday, as the Jays took control in the late going, many of the people sitting in seats that were reselling for US$2,000 began drifting out. The game will end, but L.A. traffic might not.
Meanwhile, you’re up in Canada watching in luxury. How wide’s your couch? Because at Rogers Centre and Dodger Stadium, they charge by the inch.
This assumes that the game is actually on. There is a delicious irony to the fact that as soon as Rogers got the baseball team right, the TV operation blinked out. A successful, multi-billion dollar operation, but they’re no Ernie Clement. They can’t do two things well at the same time.