The Major League Baseball playoffs are into the Fall Classic and with the Boston Red Sox taking Game 1 of the series on Wednesday, the St. Louis Cardinals are down 1-0 in the series and while the ratings should be okay for the league, did they totally blow it by scheduling games against the NFL and college football?
The answer is probably yes and the solution was actually a fairly simple one. An article on Awful Announcing brought attention to another post on Yahoo from Business Insider that described how the MLB totally "screwed" up the scheduling for the World Series and now the TV ratings are likely to suffer. The schedule has four different games (if the series goes 7) that will matchup against the NFL and one more on Saturday against college football. The article on Business Insider also shows that the league put a game on Halloween, a night that many go out and trick-or-treat with their kids, also likely to hurt the ratings.
The article offers a very simple fix for this that the MLB could have picked, which was to start the series a day early. While that is always tough for travel, this time around it might not have been so bad with each series finishing out without going the full seven games. The current schedule has NFL games for Game 2 of the World Series, as well as Games 4, 5 and 7. The one on Thursday is the Carolina Panthers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers and while that game is on NFL Network and is not a "glamour" game, you'd be surprised how many people tune into football no matter who is playing.
Game 4 will go up against Sunday night football and this week the game is the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings and while the Vikes are bad, Green Bay is not and that is considered one of the prime rivalries in the league. The next game is against Monday night football and funny enough, that game will be in St. Louis right near the Stadium as the Rams take on the Seattle Seahawks and that could take a nice cut as well. Baseball has to face college football on Saturday for Game 3 as well and then for the final game of the series it will be another Thursday game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Miami Dolphins.
The article points out, had the league put the games on ONE day earlier, they would only have ONE matchup that went head-to-head with the NFL and that would have been the Game 5 matchup on Sunday night and while that might have hurt, it would hurt a bit less than the four that they have. Boston and St. Louis are two big cities with loyal fan bases and storied histories, but they might not be able to sustain the ratings enough to make the MLB happy, as they have been routinely beaten by the NFL for years now, even the World Series.
Whether or not the ratings are killed remains to be seen. TBS and FOX had good ratings for the ALCS and NLCS, but now with the NFL in full swing with the World Series, it will be a ratings battle.