In the all-important TV ratings game, the Bucs finished ahead of the Nationals, Royals and Orioles. Still, they had a 15% drop in viewers from 2007. That's it? I wonder what they were before the trading deadline and hw low they dipped in September.
From The Sports Business Journal and the Pittsburgh Business Times:
Television ratings for Major League Baseball games were down almost across the board, as the national networks and most regional sports networks suffered significant declines during the regular season. Fox's MLB ratings dropped 13 percent to a 2.0, and its viewership dropped 12.5 percent to average 2.9 million viewers for its Saturday afternoon package.
Fox Sports Net's performance was virtually flat, off 4 percent from last year.
"That's an acceptable variance," said Kyle Sherman, FSN's executive vice president of ad sales. "FSN remained very consistent against strong competition from the Olympics and the presidential primaries. Overall, I think we held up extremely well."
FSN's best performing network was FSN Florida, which saw a 99 percent ratings jump in its Rays games (1.74 to 3.47). FSN also was helped by the Marlins, which were up 21 percent on Sun Sports and 16 percent on FSN Florida.
FSN's trouble spots were in Atlanta, where the Braves' ratings dropped 29 percent on FSN South and 28 percent on SportSouth.
MLB's top concern has to be MASN, which pulled anemic numbers for the last-place Nationals and Orioles. The combined 37,000 homes that watched both teams' games in the Baltimore-Washington market beat only Pittsburgh (32,000) and Kansas City (26,000).
With an average of only 8,000 homes tuning in for each game, the Nationals had by far the lowest audience of any team, and showed a bigger year-to-year percentage drop than any Major League team (down 50 percent).
According to industry data, the Pirates saw their average number of viewers dip about 15 percent in 2008, compared with the previous year. The Pirates averaged about 32,000 households watching each game.
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