Ignore the Ratings: Small-Market World Series Are Good for Baseball

Image courtesy of Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images

MLB Video

Sometimes, the powers that be feed us numbers that encourage us to interpret the world a certain way, and we accept them, because the world is complicated and that's scary. Usually, though, the people feeding us those numbers are trying to induce an oversimplification that favors them. Whether it be inflation, unemployment, home ownership or the Dow Jones average (high or low), we're handed these numbers by entities who want us to accede to their worldview and trust their depiction of things.

It's the same with TV ratings. There are plenty of triumphalists in the national media landscape, and plenty who read popularity as triumph. For that reason, TV ratings are often used as cudgels in conversations about the health of a sport in the U.S. Is baseball popular? Sure, look at the positive trends in their TV ratings, compared to a few years ago! Or, alternatively: Is baseball popular? No, and as proof, here are the latest TV ratings, in which the sport is getting beaten by football (always by football) and maybe even by the NBA. The natural extension of that narrative goes like this: Is a World Series featuring two of the least famous, smallest-market teams in the majors good for baseball? No. The TV ratings are going to be lousy.

That's all dramatic oversimplification, though. Is baseball less popular than it was a generation ago? It's lost market share, if we focus solely on sports, but sports are not the only context in which we can exaimine the question. People spent a lot more on movies, relative to what they spend on sports, a generation ago. They spent more on music, too. Sports are the entertainment product that has proved most durable, as the digital age has eroded the money-making power of virtually all others. Is baseball less popular than it was a generation ago? Well, in 2006, the median attendance league-wide was 2.4 million fans, and this year, it was a hair lower. But ticket prices have shot up since then, relative to inflation, and even as the regional sports network bubble pops, teams are making much more via broadcast rights deals than they were then. Football is beating baseball by more than it was before, but baseball is doing very well.

Is a small-market World Series bad for the sport? Well, first, let's correct something. The Rays aren't small-market, per se. They play in St. Petersburg, and the Tampa-St. Pete media market is the 11th-largest in the United States. It's below-average in terms of population, league-wide, but the shortcoming in the market has always been more about engaging a fan base than about finding one. Tropicana Field is an ugly and largely obsolete building in a poor location. Many people in the Tampa area are baseball fans, but most of those have allegiances that predate the Rays being established. For those reasons, the team hasn't drawn even 1.5 million fans in any season since 2013. Yet, the potential of the market has always been considerably higher than the outsiders and oversimplifiers perceive.

Nor is Milwaukee quite as small a fish as it seems, at first, even in the ocean of money that is the majors. There really is no smaller media market in the league, and Milwaukee isn't even one of the top 50 metropolitan areas by population in North America. If Major League Baseball decided to make up for lost time and expand by adding teams in Monterrey, Charlotte, Austin, Portland, Indianapolis and Nashville, Milwaukee would still be the smallest city in the majors. However, few organizations draw more healthily from beyond their metro area than this one does. Fans follow the Brewers closely from Madison and Appleton and Green Bay, and in lots of smaller towns between those and Milwaukee. They outdrew (among others) the Mets, Angels, Astros and Rangers this season, with attendance of just under 2.8 million. More than most other teams in the Midwest, they pull in fans who drive multiple hours on gameday, with their retractable-roof stadium ensuring that they don't schlep all that way for nothing.

Still, it must be admitted, neither team will draw huge viewership numbers. The Yankees, Blue Jays and Dodgers played in the World Series the last two years, helping the league gain massive viewership both domestically and globally—with vast Japanese audiences propping up the latter, as the nation tuned in to see Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki win back-to-back titles. Ratings for this series will be down. So will gate receipts. Isn't that bad for baseball? Mustn't it be?

In short: no. Don't mistake volume for value. While Yankees-Dodgers might draw a bigger audience, it doesn't help the game grow very much. It would be hard—almost impossible—to make more Yankees or Dodgers fans. Those teams are already as popular as they're ever likely to be, both locally and nationally. The players—the highly paid stars with the big Q ratings, over whom national media outlets who like covering football better tend to fawn—are already as famous as they're ever likely to get. That's not true of the Rays. We're miles and miles from saturation of the market there. Locally and nationally, that team has every opportunity to become more popular over the next decade, by a greater number of fans than almost any other team in baseball.

This team has only been around for 28 years, and it spent the first decade of its existence making almost no effort to build a real fan base. If you were a 10-year-old kid when the Rays debuted, your own kids are probably only 10 years old now. Even if your parents are from Tampa, they're probably Yankees, Reds or Atlanta fans. Maybe you were an instant convert, but you probably slouched into Rays fandom when you got back from college, once they got good and stayed good for a bit. The roots of this fandom are still shallow; every October deepens them in an important way. Trips to the World Series really do so. That's when a community really starts to take notice, and when a kid might hear about the Rays from a teacher who doesn't usually talk sports. It's when the local grocery store might put out a rack of Rays t-shirts that would never otherwise be positioned to compete with Bucs merchandise. The Rays reaching the World Series creates more fans than the Dodgers making it does.

The Brewers can't grow much more popular locally than they already are. There's always upside, but the state of Wisconsin is relatively Brewers-crazy. Nationally, though, the team is just beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Whereas the Rays (by dint of playing in the same division as the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays and being in the Eastern time zone) get a fair amount of national buzz any time they're good, Milwaukee's success was long dismissed or overlooked because they were merely dominating one of the Central divisions. Facing the Dodgers in last year's NLCS gave them some reflected glory, putting them on the map even globally—it made Jacob Misiorowski a star in Japan, for instance. Until they proved themselves better than the Dodgers this time around, though, the national baseball media gave them less than half the notice and respect they deserved.

A frequent talking point among those who enjoy pitting baseball against the other major professional men's team sports in the U.S. is that baseball fans are more provincial than others and will tune out if their team loses—that the World Series is watched only by the fans of whichever teams make it, doubling the importance of a big-market club or two reaching that showcase each year. Firstly, as we discussed above, the conclusion there is false. The league's broadcast partners might make more money in the very short term (and, thus, the league might make more money in the medium term, because higher ratings do beget bigger TV deals) when a behemoth pulls in huge numbers of viewers for a World Series, but the game grows just as well (arguably, better) when a smaller-market team pulls in newer, younger and/or more diverse fans.

It's also important to note that the premise of that argument, while not quite false, is exaggerated. It's not that no casual or neutral fans watch the World Series; it's just a lower percentage of the audience than for other leagues' championships. For the fans who do watch without a previous rooting interest, a matchup like Rays-Brewers offers a cornucopia of exciting players, whose national brands and reputations are burnished by their appearance at this level.

Over the next two weeks, Misiorowski will continue to gain fame, especially if the series goes a bit deeper than the last two and he makes two starts therein. He's not yet as famous as Paul Skenes (thanks to his draft status and more famous girlfriend), but he certainly should be. He's better than Skenes, and he's more charismatic. Jackson Chourio is as good a player as Ronald Acuña Jr. was at the same age, but hasn't yet gotten the same exposure; that will change. Junior Caminero should be at least as famous as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Fernando Tatis Jr. Drew Rasmussen is at least as good as Chris Sale. Chandler Simpson is as much a wizard with the bat as Luis Arraez, but he runs like Rickey Henderson. Brice Turang is his generation's Chase Utley. Each team has a small handful of stars who deserve to be household names, but would never get their desserts but for this opportunity. Each has another, larger group of players who will be good players and fill meaningful roles in future seasons and postseasons. Neutral fans benefit from this glimpse of those guys;, too. It makes them more familiar and credible in the future.

There's also a question of style and personality here, and of whether the national media really wants what it claims to want. The Brewers and Rays are brash teams. Caminero's and William Contreras's playoff home-run trots have each been laughed about and measured down to the tenth of a second, as pundits marvel (and sometimes complain) about the way the two flout the game's rigid, aged conventions. Milwaukee's Abner Uribe got in trouble this spring for a display of crotch-chopping toward the Cardinals dugout that was unreservedly antagonistic. The Yankees, Dodgers and Blue Jays are loaded with veterans who emote in predictable ways on the field, and who always seem to be in-bounds. These two teams have younger players who care much less for decorum. That will appeal to younger audiences, in a way Freddie Freeman and Gerrit Cole can't. It might also make some pundits in privileged positions of influence uneasy.

Please notice that I'm not mentioning the upcoming labor dispute and lockout at all. I don't think the fact that these two teams happen to be playing in the Series this year has any bearing on the CBA negotiations that lie ahead, just as I don't believe the Dodgers' two straight titles or the pennants claimed by the AL East's bigger financial players the last two years mattered. That's another bit of narrative nonsense being waved in front of your eyes, by people who don't care very much about the sport itself, and who are covering the game (instead) through a business-first lens, like covering the horse race instead of the ideas and merits in political campaigns. It's just like TV ratings. Ignore it.

Whichever team wins this World Series, a fan base that has never before gotten to savor the unique joy of a baseball championship will finally attain that feeling. Whichever team wins, new fans will be reached and casual fans will be enthralled by the depth and breadth of talent these sides demonstrate. Baseball will grow because of this World Series matchup, in a way it wouldn't have grown if the Dodgers were back for a threepeat or if the Yankees were trying to get back to the top of the mountain. The TV ratings will be worse. Pay them no mind. What you're about to see is a whole lot of good baseball, and it'll be good for baseball, too.