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I rejoined FOX shortly after they had obtained the rights to broadcast major league baseball. As I made the rounds of offices of my colleagues both familiar and new, I noticed that unlike my last go-round there were an awful lot of baseball tzotchkes on display. In Los Angeles, even though the Dodgers were in a bit of down cycle, there were Dodger foam fingers and pennants almost everywhere, save for the New York ex-pats that almost to a person featured Yankees swag. In our New York offices, virtually everyone was displaying something Yankee-centric.
Given that they had just won their first World Championship in 18 years, and the uncompetitive Mets were defined by the one-dimensional Bernard Gilkey, I assumed this was mostly spur of the moment support. Little did I realize it was the foundation for a business deal that’s taken about a quarter-century to finally bear fruit.
Buoyed with success from two consecutive World Series featuring the Yankees (1996 and 1998) and optimistic about the potential of a third in 2000, FOX came together to not merely double down, but nearly quadruple down on their investment in baseball by usurping exclusive rights after sharing the package with long-time incumbent NBC for five years. It was indeed a seminal moment in sports broadcasting history; after all, NBC had been telecasting games since 1939. Vin Scully, Bob Costas and company would no longer be part of the fall landscape. And it came with a price that many of my colleagues thought carried high risk.
But when you’d sit with those most directly involved with negotiations, they’d waive you off. “If we get the big markets and a seven-game series, one year will pretty much pay for itself. When a Subway Series between the Mets and Yankees came to pass that fall, I naively thought they had gotten their wish. The number one market, times two. I quickly learned how silly my assumption of getting the series I desired most being a positive was. I was lectured by several top FOX Sports executives: “Yankees-Dodgers. That’s our holy grail. We get that, we’re golden. Anything else is not ideal”.
As we’ve been reminded on several occasions as the Mets stayed alive this year in the NLCS, outside of New York City, interest in a Subway Series is nominal, and the 2000 series was an essentially one-sided five-game anoniting for the Yankees. And audience levels declined -24% versus NBC’s final Fall Classic in 1999, not to mention a double-digit decline from the Yankee sweep of San Diego that FOX endured the year before.
Well last night in Los Angeles, in spite of whatever Hail Mary emotional support Mets fans like moi could attempt to muster, the miraculous post-season run of these insurgent sixth seeds finally came to an end and the Dodgers, with the best record in baseball, punched their fourth World Series ticket in the past eight years. And, at long last, they get a date with the Yankees.
It’s been 43 years since these teams faced off, a rare Dodger win over a team that owned them for all but one year when they regularly met as rivals in New York. That just happened to be the last time more than 40 million people (on average) watched a World Series. The prior time they squared off was 1978, which still stands as the all-time high for World Series viewership with an average of 44.3 million viewers. That was a rematch from an era-defining series the year prior that saw Reggie Jackson become Mr. October with a record three home runs in the deciding game.
The baar for success is much, much lower now. Last fall’s matchup of wild card smaller market insurgents Texas and Arizona was the least-viewed World Series of all time, with an average of barely 9 million viewers watching. Sure, it’s still a whole lot better than a lineup of reality competition, animation and a couple of lower-cost scripted dramas could muster up. But when even regular season football audiences are garnering more than double that level, it’s a sobering reminder of how sorely needed a dream scenario like this is needed for FOX.
Veteran New York area baseball writer Bob Klapisch, now of NJ.com, waxed quixotic about the potential in a piece he dropped this morning:
At a time when MLB keeps contorting itself to please consumers with short attention spans, it’s nice to know some traditions aren’t dead just yet. Tune into Game 1 of the World Series on Friday and you’ll plug into the sport’s oldest, richest rivalry. Not only will we be treated to a Yankees-Dodgers best of seven, it’ll be an old-fashioned squaring off of the industry’s two best teams, featuring the two biggest superstars. Go ahead, name another showcase that could come close to Aaron Judge against Shohei Ohtani. For once, FOX won’t need its hype machine.
And as a longtime friend and fellow colleague observed for the ironically named Bill Shea in an ATHLETIC piece from two years ago, success in this day and age is relative:
“Show me something that’s setting an all-time (viewership) record somewhere,” said Patrick Crakes, a media analyst and former Fox Sports executive. “This is the range it’s at. The World Series was a top-10 prime-time show 50 years ago alongside ‘Mannix’ and it still is today. What else does that?
Our friend Patrick, who I’m pretty sure still has his Cleveland paraphenalia on display in relative defiance as he did when we first met in a year where his team below an extra-inning Game 7 lead that would have ended what at the time was a 49-year championship drought, has a point.
This year’s top show so far is Matlock. Anything in that ballpark will be a plus.
And if this series happens to go seven games, unlike every one of the previous Yankee-Dodger showdowns of the New York-Los Angeles era?
At long last, those aggressive plans from a quarter-century ago might finally be justified.