2009 MLB regular season TV ratings down

The TV numbers across the board were down for the 2009 MLB regular season. There are many possible reasons for this, but the most prevalent one is there was only one compelling playoff race, and the teams of the American League Central was played awful for much of the season. Really though this was a baseball season totally void of compelling stories, there was no pitcher striving for a 20 game win season, no American League batter came, close to hitting 50 home runs, and most of the races were decided well before September.

The news was pretty bad for all the networks broadcasting MLB games. Fox saw its flagship, Saturday Afternoon Baseball, saw a 10% drop. Fox ended its season October 2nd, and only saw a 1.2 rating with 1.7 million average viewers. Of the October 2nd games only one had post season implications. However those numbers are 48% off from the last weekend of the 2008 season. Of course those games featured three games featuring post season implications.

The News was bad for ESPN as well. Their flagship, Sunday Night Baseball, saw a 6% decrease to 2.46 million viewers. ESPN has a different set of things to blame; a Yankees/Red Sox match up was moved out of prime time to 2PM because of Yom Kippur. These games are usually very highly rated, and the loss could explain most of the 6% decrease. Over the 66 games shown on ESPN the audience was down 8%.

TBS was the only national broadcaster that saw its numbers go up for MLB games. Their viewership jumped 27%, from 730K to 930K. However on the local level, half of the 30 MLB teams showed an increase in TV audience. Since overall MLB attendance was down for 2009 we can surmise that many of these fans stayed, home and watched the games on TV.