Last Thursday, we took a look into the Chicago Cubs’ exploding TV Ratings, as (according to the Nielson Ratings) they had experienced the largest year over year increase in ratings of any team in baseball.
More specifically, thanks to the Chicago Tribune, we learned that the Cubs had averaged about a 1.5 rating on the games televised by CSN in 2014, and a 4.5 rating on games televised by CSN in 2016 – a 3x increase in just two years!
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But now that you have a good reference point for a really solid regular season TV rating, let’s put that aside and take a look at what happened during last night’s NLDS Game 3 match-up:
TV RATINGS: Last night's #Cubs–#SFGiants #NLDS Gm 3 posted an 18.4 Chicago mrkt rtg; over 457K homes (13.2) were STILL tuned in at 1:45am CT pic.twitter.com/jTR1tMdvAU
— Jeff Nuich (@JeffNuich) October 11, 2016
Wow. The Cubs and the Giants secured an 18.4 market rating overall … holy. crap. Not only is that figure alone hugely impressive, it remained as high as 13.2 when the game was coming to an end near 3 am ET/2 am CT (heck, it was midnight on the West Coast, too – on a Monday!).
Obviously, last night was a bit of a perfect storm, as far as dramatic sports television goes (potential clincher for the Cubs, elimination for the Giants, Bumgarner v. Arrieta, etc.), but wow is that something else, especially when you consider that the game was on FoxSports1, rather than a more widely-distributed channel.
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And as far as confirming that 457K homes were actually up and watching at 1:45 in the morning, I can only say that Twitter was quite clearly still engaged (and then happy, and then angry, and then sad, and then a little hungry, but ultimately very sleepy).
The Cubs and Giants have another go of it tonight, and although the pitching match-up isn’t as high-profile, I wouldn’t be surprised to see another big television rating. Hopefully, this one ends a bit earlier than last night’s affair.