Pitch Clock World Series

We touched on this in one of our earlier posts that World Series ratings have been on the decline for some time now.  The baseball gods though decided that the fix was to add a pitch clock and other rule changes to speed up the game.  One would think the introduction of the pitch clock would have turned around the decline of this year’s Fall Classic.  Think again.

This year’s series pitting the Texas Rangers against the Arizona Diamondbacks led to the lowest rated World Series ever.  Television rating highlights…..uh should we say lowlights from this year’s Fall Classic include:

• Lowest average viewership totaling 9.95 million, which broke the Covid shortened 2020 season low mark
• A drop of 23% from last year’s World Series television audience
• The least watched television viewership for a single game (game 3 of this year’s series) in World Series history with only 8.13 million viewers
• Only the final game of the five game series surpassed the 10 million mark, with 11.45 million viewers

It is easy to explain a portion of this year’s disastrous ratings, since both teams come from smaller baseball markets with an absence of any must see players on either team.  In addition, there is no way around the fact that the World Series has been on the decline for some time now.  That is way down from its height of popularity in the late 1970’s where they averaged more than 44 million viewers in 1978.  Certainly, a different era, where there were less entertainment choices and the internet did not exist.  Despite all that, MLB has been touting the pitch clock and taking credit for the overall increased attendance this year (which we do not agree with), so shouldn’t we be calling out the failure of the pitch clock to increase television viewership for the World Series?

Despite the ratings disaster, there were plenty in the mainstream media celebrating how quickly they played the games.  Evidently, these were the fastest World Series games played since 1996.  What we find amazing is that the pro pitch clock contingent now considers a World Series a success based on how fast they play it.  The culmination of the baseball season with the two best teams and simply plaing a fast game makes it all better in the end for everyone.  Do you think that those in Texas and Arizona cared one bit that the games were probably a half-hour faster than prior years?  Would Diamondback fans really have cared if a game lasted 16 innings which they ended up winning after 4 1/2 hours? The answer to both those questions is an emphatic no from either fan base.

If MLB and the mainstream medias thinking is that we only measure success based upon the length of a World Series game going forward, then we must expect that all of them would enjoy their dining experience at McDonald’s over a five star Michelin restaurant based solely on how quickly they can get in and out of the establishment.  MLB and their media puppets could have just stayed silent and licked their wounds, but that was not good enough when it came to this year’s Fall Classic.  Instead, they still ended up defending their pitch clock even in the wake of the worst ratings in World Series history.