It's a circle of love.
Simply put, it’s not longer trashy and dramatic and boo hoo, national sports writers are bored. Steve Berthiaume even went as far as to say in a blog he wrote on ESPN yesterday that the rivalry needs ‘to be fixed’. No fucking clue what that means, but apparently the rivalry is broken, the nation is sick of it, tuning out in record numbers and baseball as a whole suffers because we have to endure 18 long, drawn-out Red Sox-Yankees games. Oh the agony.
Too bad none of the numbers from this weekend’s series support anything he’s saying.The reason the league matches the Yankees and Red Sox against each other so much is really simple: Because people watch it. In fact, they’re still by far the league’s biggest draw. Even without the shenanigans. Take a look for yourself:
- MLB’s Friday night telecast of the first game was the network’s highest rated game of 2011 and the highest rated prime time broadcast in the network’s history. Their average of 563,000 viewers was the second largest audience ever, second only to Stephen Strasburg’s debut with the Washington Nationals last year.
- Saturday’s FOX broadcast was the highest rated non-playoff game in the last three years, drawing 4.10 million eyes.
- ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball telecast of game #3 was the most watched baseball game in four years, averaging 4.72 million viewers. The last big draw game? The Red Sox vs the Yankees on June 3, 2007.
So much for ‘ramming it down people’s throats’. It sounds like they’re patiently waiting to be fed food that looks and smells as good as it tastes.
Berthiaume then launches into hysterical rants about salary caps, pink hats, small markets vs big markets, playoff systems and a whole host of completely unrelated stuff that have absolutely nothing to do with whether people want to see the Red Sox and Yankees play a lot of baseball games. Sounds like sour grapes. Read: I don’t like the Red Sox and Yankees. I wish baseball was football.
So much for that. Until another rivalry replaces that of the Yankees-Red Sox as the most watched games in baseball, you’ll keep seeing them.
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