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Ed Note: The following appears courtesy our friends at the National Sports Journalism Center.

You’ve heard the familiar storyline: Sports fans are losing interest in baseball. The game moves too slowly, young viewers are tuning out, even old viewers are drifting elsewhere.

Well, as Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend.”

Last week, Maury Brown did a piece for Forbes.com on local TV ratings for baseball. It suggests that reports of the game’s demise have been grossly exaggerated.

Brown wrote:

Major League Baseball is king during prime time at the regional level thus far this season for regional sports networks (RSNs) winning the key prime time slot in the US markets that Nielsen Media Company tracks.

The data bolsters the position that baseball continues to be a solid programming choice for networks in the summer when the major networks are in reruns.

According to the information from Nielsen, of the 29 U.S.-based clubs in the league, 12 of them are the #1-rated programming in prime time since the start of the season in their home markets, beating both broadcast and cable competition. These teams include the Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, Milwaukee Brewers, Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals, Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants, and Arizona Diamondbacks.

Mr. Corso, can I have a little help here? I could use another, “Not so fast, my friend.” There are a couple of things to consider in Brown’s post.

Judging baseball’s success in terms of where it rates among prime-time programming doesn’t say as much as you’d think. With so many choices out there for viewers, the ratings for all prime-time shows have been extremely splintered, resulting in a much lower threshold to be No. 1 in a time slot. In many evenings in our house, the most viewed shows are on Netflix.

Also, I would offer that local baseball telecasts, especially for successful teams, have generated strong ratings among other prime-time programming in recent years, given the current TV landscape. I don’t think this is a recent trend.

Brown’s story also doesn’t get into any historical context. Are local baseball ratings higher, lower, flat in 2014? Yes, the game does well in primetime, but are the overall numbers improving at the local level? It still is tied to winning and losing. Last week, in a Chicago Tribune column, I detailed sharp local TV ratings declines for the struggling Cubs and White Sox.

Later in the story, Brown asks a key question:

The numbers bode do bode well for network partners, such as Fox Sports. The question is, why do national ratings seem to lag, while regionally ratings are mostly flourishing?

The issue about lagging national numbers is easy to answer. Again it deals with splintered ratings due to so many national games being available on so many different platforms. We’re a long way from the days of Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek on NBC Game of the Week on Saturday afternoons as the only national game on the menu. Does anyone even know where to find the Fox Saturday game anymore?

The more relevant ratings are for the All-Star Game and the post-season. If baseball is generating so much interest on the local level, it logically would follow that there should be more viewers tuning in to the games on the sport’s biggest stage, right?

Nope.

Baseball hasn’t pulled a double-digit rating for the All-Star Game since 2001, and hasn’t even delivered a 7 since 2010.

Meanwhile, the World Series, the crown jewel, has averaged in the double-digits only once since 2009. Last year, Boston’s six-game victory over St. Louis only averaged an 8.9 rating on Fox. More was expected in a Series featuring two of the game’s most marketable teams.

You can’t blame splintered ratings in primetime, because these are recent trends for the World Series and All-Star Games. Meanwhile, the drop-off hasn’t been as dramatic in marquee events in other sports.

Now you could spin ratings information many different ways. While some might see the local ratings as positive news for baseball, thrown in the context of the sagging All-Star Game and World Series, it begs another question: Has baseball become a provincial game for fans?

In other words, fans are interested in the home team, but not so much in national stories. Once your Favorite 9 fades out of the race, you turn your attention elsewhere.

You certainly can come to that conclusion based on local and national ratings. It has to be a concern for baseball’s various network partners who have committed billions in the current deals to broadcasting national games. To maximize their investments, they need to find a way to increase ratings for baseball’s biggest games.

It’s great to see teams like Detroit and St. Louis are doing big ratings for games on their outlets and that Pittsburgh fans are watching in big numbers with the Pirates relevant again. But those are snapshots, not the complete picture.

The fact is: The game does move too slowly, and it is losing fans, young and old.

About Ed Sherman

Ed Sherman is a veteran sports media writer and purveyor of The Sherman Report website. His writing can also be found at the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and the National Sports Journalism Center.

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