LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The looming World Series between the Anaheim Angels and the San Francisco Giants would seem to have all the elements -- two unlikely teams, exciting players and sunny California weather.
But will America want to watch an all-California series?
Thus far, across the six divisional and league Major League Baseball playoff series that have aired on Fox, ratings are mixed.
For the two league championship series -- the Angels versus the Minnesota Twins and the Giants versus the St. Louis Cardinals -- Fox's ratings in households were down 7 percent over last year. But overall, including the four divisional series, the playoff ratings are up 5 percent over 2001.
Fox Sports, which paid $2.5 billion in 2000 for six years' worth of baseball broadcasting rights, is optimistic that, in a best-case scenario, this year's Fall Classic can match the 2001 World Series, a seven-game thriller between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees.
"I think that a competitive seven-game series can approach what were outstanding numbers for last year's World Series," Fox Sports President and Executive Producer Ed Goren told Reuters. "If we get that, we're going to be fine."
That 2001 contest drew 24.5 million viewers, the best audience turnout for the World Series in four years. Historically, though, the performance of regional contests has been something of a mixed bag.
The last regional series, 2000's so-called "Subway Series" between the New York Yankees and New York Mets, drew an average of 18.1 million viewers in five games on Fox, according to Nielsen Media Research, the lowest total in nearly 30 years.
Previous California series have fared better though. The 1989 matchup between the Giants and Oakland Athletics on ABC drew 24.6 million viewers over four games, while the 1988 Athletics-Los Angeles Dodgers contest pulled 34.5 million viewers in five games for NBC.
Both of those series benefited, however, from memorable first games that generated media attention.
In 1988, a pinch-hit home run by injured Dodgers star Kirk Gibson played heavily in sports highlight reels and drew fans. In 1989, the opening game was interrupted by a major earthquake (news - web sites) that led the series to be postponed for a few weeks.
The first two games of this year's series, Saturday and Sunday at Anaheim, are both scheduled for 7:35 p.m. EDT (1135 GMT), meaning an early start on the West Coast. Games 3 through 5, though, are set for 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT) starts.
Since 1994's baseball strike, which wiped out the World Series that year, the Fall Classic has failed to break 30 million average viewers, which it regularly did before the strike. The best-rated series since the strike was 1995's Atlanta Braves-Cleveland Indians match on ABC, drawing just shy of 29 million viewers.
Goren said it would be difficult for any World Series now to match the pre-strike numbers because Nielsen, in measuring ratings, has increased the number of households it tracks, meaning it takes significantly more viewers now to achieve the same rating figures as before.
But no matter the metric, this year's series has a long way to go to equal the viewership of Nielsen's top-rated one ever -- 1978's Yankees-Dodgers contest on NBC, a six-game rematch of the previous year's series, that pulled 44.3 million viewers.
So is there a fan favorite going in, even for the fans who aren't from California?
"If you believe that America roots for the underdog, (that) they love Cinderella, (then) they got it with the Angels," Goren said.
Fox and Fox Sports are units of News Corp Ltd. NBC is a unit of General Electric Co. CBS is a unit of Viacom Inc. ABC is a unit of Walt Disney Co.
By Ben Berkowitz Tue Oct 15, 7:45 PM ET
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