The Pen: MLB owners’ vote could be big news for baseball fans cutting the cord

As part of his opening statement to reporters at Major League Baseball’s owners meetings this week, commissioner Rob Manfred said that teams had “approved unanimously a revised interactive media rights agreement.”

It was a jumbled bit of jargon that was easy to miss between the confirmation that the Kansas City Royals had a new ownership group and the part of the press conference where Manfred evaded questions about the sign-stealing investigation into the Astros organization. This winter is rife already with impactful storylines, existential threats to the game, and even some free-agent signings. It’s easy to ignore a change to the back-end business side of baseball. But this one might have direct implications for fans.

Asked to clarify what exactly the “revised interactive media rights agreement” looks like, Manfred said, “The biggest single change was the return of certain in-market digital rights — the rights that have essentially become substitutional with broadcast rights — those rights will return to the clubs.”

A consideration of potential changes of importance involving how we watch baseball.

Strong ending helps World Series avoid record low viewership

NEW YORK (AP) — It may be no solace to the Houston Astros, but the Washington Nationals’ comeback win in the World Series helped baseball avoid a dubious record.

The series’ seventh and deciding game reached 23.2 million people, eclipsing even “Sunday Night Football” and enabling the Series to average just under 14 million viewers per game, the Nielsen company said. The last game drew nearly 7 million more viewers than any of the other games.

Through five games, the series was on pace to be the least-watched Fall Classic ever.

At least for another year, San Francisco’s four-game sweep of Detroit in 2012 keeps the record of least popular series ever. It averaged 12.66 million viewers.

One last ratings report- as a side note, many of you may find flipping to a few paragraphs ahead rather interesting in terms of understanding the current media market.

Nationals-Astros was least-watched Game 7 this decade, but the ratings news isn’t all bad

These days, when it comes to baseball ratings, you take the good with the bad. For this World Series between the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals, and specifically Wednesday night’s Game 7, there was indeed both good and bad.

John Ourand of Sports Business Journal reports Game 7 had 23.013 million viewers with a 13.1 rating. It was 24 million when you add streaming platforms. That makes it the most-watched non-NFL sporting event of the year on Fox and the most-streamed MLB game ever on Fox.

Those numbers are quite a bit more than the previous games in this series — 85 percent actually, according to Fox Sports’ Michael Mulvihill. The Hollywood Reporter is also calling it the most-watched baseball game in two years.

Where that doesn’t compare as well is to other World Series Game 7s this decade. In fact, it ranks the lowest among the five, coming in below the 2014 Game 7 between the Royals and Giants, which drew 23.517 million viewers. The other end of that is Cubs and Indians in 2016 with 40.047 million.

Nielsen: 2019 World Series on track to be least-watched ever

This year’s Houston Astros-Washington Nationals World Series is on track to be the least-watched in the history of the game, the Associated Press reported via Nielsen data on Tuesday.

The series has averaged 11.6 million viewers through the first five games, according to Nielsen. The current least-watched series was the San Francisco Giants’ sweep of the Detroit Tigers in 2012, which garnered an average of 12.64 million viewers.

An important note, however, is that at least one elimination game — which you might expect to bring higher viewership — is yet to come. Should the Astros clinch it in Game 6, however, it would need to draw approximately 18 million viewers to bring the series’ average over 2012’s average (or average about 15.5 million over the final two games).

[Steps back, waits for the arguments as for why to begin]

Nats’ Game 1 victory drew average of 12.1 million viewers

The World Series opener between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros narrowly averted setting a record low.

Washington’s 5-4 victory Tuesday night averaged 12,194,000 viewers, according to national numbers from Nielsen. That edges the 12,191,000 who tuned in for San Francisco’s 7-1 win over Kansas City in the 2014 opener.

The numbers are down 11.4% from last year’s Game 1 between the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers, which averaged 13.76 million viewers. The 2017 opener between Houston and LA averaged 14.7 million.

Let the arguments concerning what this means begin!

ESPN may re-work ‘Sunday Night Baseball,’ but A-Rod is safe

The person making this decision needs to be fired and his exact opposite needs to take his place.

Former New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez will be back on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” next season, but the rest of the broadcast team could be different. ESPN is considering making changes in the broadcast booth next season, according to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post.

TNT preempting Star Wars marathon for playoff baseball led to hilarious complaints and “spoilers”

Sports events sometimes run longer than scheduled or wind up on alternate channels, and that can lead to some funny complaints from viewers expecting to see something else. We’ve seen this before with things like college basketball running into golf or college football games being sent to Fox Business Network, but a particularly humorous one happened Monday with TNT. Turner’s plan was to show both National League Division Series games back to back on TBS, with Braves-Cardinals starting at 3 p.m. ET and Dodgers-Nationals beginning at 6:40 p.m. ET. However, Braves-Cardinals ran long, with the Cardinals eventually winning 5-4 in the 10th inning at around 7:15 p.m. Eastern.

You’d think that wouldn’t be a huge problem, as Turner has another high-distribution channel in TNT, and they were able to start Dodgers-Nationals there (including the pre-game show). But that led to a lot of complaints from those who were expecting to watch other programming on TNT at that point; a marathon of the original Star Wars trilogy, including 1977’s A New Hope (on the West Coast feed) and 1983’s Return of the Jedi (on the East Coast Feed). Here are some of those complaints

Bad enough that baseball has been supplanted by football- but being supplanted by a movie series that in forty-plus years has produced maybe one-and-a-half films’ worth of good material?

2019 MLB playoffs bracket, postseason field

The playoff field and the 2019 MLB postseason bracket has been set. The Cardinals clinched the NL Central on the last day of the regular season, finalizing the playoff picture. The postseason will begin on Tuesday, Oct. 1 with the NL Wild Card Game, and if the World Series runs goes the distance, the seventh and final game would take place on Oct. 30.

The full schedule and bracket for the 2019 MLB playoffs can be found below. Postseason games will air on ESPN, Fox, FS1, TBS and MLB Network. Games on TBS and the Fox networks can be streamed on fuboTV

Make your plans and set your DVRs, everyone!