ST. LOUIS -- Game 2 of the NCLS between the Giants and Cardinals is scheduled for Sunday night at 8:00 pm EST (preview). This, of course, puts it opposite a prime-time NFL game between something called the "Eagles" and a gathering of presumably helmeted individuals called the "Giants," which is the pilfered name of the team that's up 1-0 in that NLCS.
Spoiler alert for the Nielsen obsessives among us: Said NFL contest will beat said NLCS contest by a large margin in TV ratings.
Some with a child's grasp of the larger issues in play will tweet out these numbers as formidable evidence that baseball is dying or no longer culturally relevant or has a full diaper or whatever. These adorable sorts should be ignored with the zeal of the newly converted. Why? Here are a few reasons that stripped-from-context national TV ratings aren't that important as an indicator of baseball's health ...
•MLB draws a much smaller overall percentage of its revenues from national TV deals than the NFL does. The NFL dominates MLB in national TV ratings? It had damn well better. As a business, it's far more dependent upon those Nielsen figures that the superiorly diversified MLB is.
•MLB is a local-television colossus, which explains in large part those massive local television contracts and RSN equity stakes that are enriching teams across the league. This is important, as baseball, with its six-month regular season, is a highly localized sport. That emotional investment at the local level means that eyeballs will be lost when 20 teams don't make the postseason.
•The NFL is "event programming" played primarily one weekend day a week during cold-weather months as part of a 17-week regular season. Of course it's going to have higher national TV ratings. Again, it had damn well better.
•MLB is faring exceptionally well when it comes to national TV ratings relative to programming other than that of the NFL. People consume media across many different platforms these days, and our attentions are divided like never before. The top-rated TV shows have ratings that are but slivers of those of the top-rated shows from 25 years ago. So it is with MLB. The NFL is the outlier in all of this, and that's to the league's tremendous credit. Still, those with skin in the game are paying MLB a lot of money for the those national TV rights. Relative to the entire national-television landscape, MLB is doing quite well.
•Want context-free comparisons? MLB crushes the NFL in ticket revenues. Ergo, the NFL is dying. See how silly that is?
The larger point is that MLB is a $9-billion industry that's wildly profitable and popular. Keep all that in mind as Sunday night TV ratings are trotted out and costumed in an importance they don't merit.
