The Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants are putting together a pretty entertaining World Series, and while it’s not exactly delivering massive national ratings, the local ratings are doing quite well. The ratings in Kansas City have really stood out thusfar, however.
Through three games (excluding Saturday evening’s Game 4, which didn’t have publicly released ratings at the time of this article’s publication), the Kansas City market is averaging a 48.9 rating for the World Series, meaning that a hair under half of the viewers in the Kansas City market were watching the series. The Royals’ Game 2 win over the Giants drew a 49.7 rating in the market, which is inconceivable to think about. Perhaps even crazier is the 49.0 rating that Game 3 – airing on a Friday night – drew.
But this sort of ratings craziness isn’t new for the Royals. The club has drawn a local record rating six times in the 11 games they played prior to Saturday – not bad considering that eight of those games were on TBS as opposed to Fox.
The 2014 World Series won’t finish as the least-viewed ever, barring a disastrous end to the final three games of the series – viewership hasn’t dropped below 12 million for any game, and the fact that it’s going to go at least six games will add some intrigue and viewers to their overall average. But could you imagine the local rating in Kansas City if this series goes to seven games? Yeah, it’s a smaller market and the rating wouldn’t mean as much as say, a 55 in Boston, but a small market supporting their team can only lead to good things for the future of the game in that market and perhaps nationally.