NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 07: The Twitter logo is displayed on a banner outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on November 7, 2013 in New York City. Twitter goes public on the NYSE today and is expected to open at USD 26 per share, making the company worth an estimated USD 18 billion. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

We learned on Thursday that Wednesday night’s World Series Game 7 between the Cubs and Indians was the most watched baseball game in 25 years.

If you take 10.5 million tweets and divide that by the roughly four and a half hours (270 minutes), you get about 40,000 tweets per minute about the World Series game.

This comes as no surprise, given the stakes and the audience for the game and Twitter’s relative youth. Still, it’s a fun way to quantify that amount of people who were actively engaged with the game. Baseball, with its disproportionately older audience, tends not to take over Twitter the way an NFL playoff or NBA Finals game does, but during Wednesday night, it was hard to find anyone talking about anything but the World Series.

For decades we’ve treated television ratings as the end-all for gauging interest in an event or show, but with cord-cutting and increased online and mobile streaming, we may soon have to seek other measures. Maybe social media engagement becomes the next Nielsen rating. Or maybe not. But 10.5 million is still a whole lot of tweets.

About Alex Putterman

Alex is a writer and editor for The Comeback and Awful Announcing. He has written for The Atlantic, VICE Sports, MLB.com, SI.com and more. He is a proud alum of Northwestern University and The Daily Northwestern. You can find him on Twitter @AlexPutterman.

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