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Despite making numerous rule changes that appear to have helped with attendance and viewership in 2023, this season’s Major League Baseball World Series is proving that you still need marquee names to draw in the borderline baseball fan.
This year, umpiring was better, there was a major spike in attendance, and fans seem relatively happy with the pitch clock speeding up games.
All of that, however, hasn’t translated to the World Series games between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers.
Neither team won their division, so they both had to begin the MLB playoffs as Wild Cards.
Arizona hasn’t been to a Series since they beat the New York Yankees in 2001. Texas has never won one and they came into the league way back in 1961 as the second-incarnation of the Washington Senators.
And while one underdog playing in the Fall Classic might actually draw some eyeballs, two, going head to head, apparently isn’t enough to entice viewers.
According to Front Office Sports, Game 2 of the World Series on Saturday night averaged 8.15 million views on Fox, making it the least-watched World Series game of all-time.
Nielsen has been keeping these records since the 1960s.
By comparison, in 1987, Game 7 of the Cardinals and Twins series had 51.18 million viewers. In 1980, Game 6 between the Phillies and Royals averaged 54.86 million viewers.
The previous low was Game 3 of the 2020 World Series (during the pandemic) between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays, which averaged 8.34 million.
Not only that, the exciting 11 inning Game 1, with an average of 9.17 million viewers on Fox, was the least-watched Game 1 in the history of the World Series on TV.
Those two games were only the sixth and seventh time since the Series began being broadcast on TV that they didn’t have at least 10 million viewers.
Sports Media Watch reports that the 1978 World Series between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers is the most watched matchup of all time with an average of 44,27 million viewers watching each game.
The last time a Fall Classic saw more than 20 million people watching every game was in 2004 when the Red Sox swept the Cardinals in four games.
Even as recently as 2022, not a single one of the Phillies and Astros World Series games had less than an average of 10.79 million.
The Rangers and Diamondbacks World Series is well on pace to be the least watched World Series of all time.