Poor TBS. FOX's coverage of ALCS Game 4 (Texas at Detroit) ended up going 11 innings and four hours, from a delayed start at 6:35 pm ET to 10:35 pm. The TBS game (NLCS Game 3, Milwaukee at St Louis) started on time shortly after 8 pm, and anyone tuning in to TBS from FOX after their game ended found a game already in the 7th inning. TBS was free of FOX's Major League Baseball coverage for only 43 minutes, from 10:35-11:18.
Texas is now up 3 games to 1, making a short series almost guaranteed, as predicted. FOX is probably happy just to get the damn thing over with and not worry about the extra revenue of the later games.
Tonight's scheduled X Factor will air Thursday night. The episode that was scheduled for Thursday is now set for Sunday--but that's also when a 7th game of the American League series would air if necessary, so the schedule shifting isn't necessarily over.
The Sked: Baseball Postseason Schedule Update
The Sked: MLB Postseason Hell
TBS was already looking at a terrible number tonight. Sunday afternoon's Game 1 of the NLCS managed a 1.0 rating (ugh), and Monday night's Game 2, trampled by FOX's primetime runover of its 11-inning game, could only muster a 0.8 (pathetic). Tonight's game could be literally a perfect game, and the rating would still be minuscule.
There is no bigger baseball fan than I am, but this Postseason points to everything that's wrong with the sport. Only a few teams people care about. Rain delays. Extremely long games that are subject to late October weather. A scheduling nightmare for the networks that are supposed to boost the sport. Long series with only a small chance that we will be treated to playoff-like Games 7.
Major League Baseball insists that these games are not the "playoffs" but rather "the postseason" because the format is technically not a playoff-format. Well, that playoff format works pretty well for the NFL. It might be time for the sport -- the one that eschews change -- to do something radical and adopt something like a sudden-death playoff format. Something's got to be done. Otherwise, no broadcast network is going to be interested in carrying this sport much longer.
The Sked: CABLE RATINGS September 27-October 3
Sports dominate the top of the weekly cable ratings chart. ESPN's NFL Monday Night Football was #1 again in the cable world, although down from a 7.2 demo rating last week when the more attractive Dallas-Washington game was on. In addition, the early round of Major League Baseball's Postseason is scattered throughout the chart below.
Naturally the highest-rated early round game featured the New York Yankees, a team with a huge fan base and a team others love to hate. Program note: Wednesday night October 5, TBS will have the decisive Game 5 in the Detroit Tigers-NY Yankees series. FOX and TBS executives are currently holding a vigil that the Yankees and not the Tigers advance to the next round. FOX has to be pulling for a Philadelphia Phillies-NY Yankees World Series, as opposed to, say, Milwaukee Brewers-Detroit Tigers.
Another baseball note. The "MLB Post Game" program in the chart below ranked #5 for the week, and capped ESPN's terrific coverage of the final night of the regular season (last Wednesday), when the wild card spots were finally decided in three close games in primetime. The games themselves barely made the chart because the drama didn't build until the very end of the evening. The post game rating shows the interest that did build like a crescendo.
Boardwalk Empire and Dexter premiered against each other Sunday at 9 pm and tied at 1.1 rating, about a third of what True Blood routinely did in the time period. Both episodes, by the way, were fairly slow as season premiere resets often are, but Dexter seemed especially uninspired and even lazy. In contrast, the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad was filled with tension and excitement but failed to make our 1.0 rating cutoff for the chart (a 0.8 rating). 