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Originally Posted by UMP25
You cannot compare baseball to other sports in terms of ratings, JR, without tweaking numbers. Baseball plays 162 games a year for 6-7 months. They play every day of the week except for two specific dates (two dates on which no major pro sport plays, BTW). Football plays, for the most part, on one day a week--Sundays (I'm not including Monday Night Football here because that's one game and not most/all of the NFL).
I absolutely love the NFL, but I can assure you of this: if they played 7 days a week, I'd tune out. As it is now, I hate it when they play on Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday during a given week. This overexposure or oversaturation results in lower viewing ratings, but that doesn't mean its popularity has declined. For another year, MLB recorded record attendance. I believe that's the third or fourth year in a row, too. Hardly the sign of a sport in which "most Americans" have little interest.
You also cannot define its popularity by citing participation among the nation's high schoolers, because, among other reasons, football, for example, has a bigger roster and necessarily requires more participants in order to function. Also, baseball is not considered a big "money sport" for one main reason: baseball parks at high schools and colleges lack the ability to draw fans in the area of 30,000 to 100,000, which is something football can do. Even soccer and basketball can draw more fans. So, financial logistics will determine the apparent "popularity" to which you allude.
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Here are the selected weekend TV ratings measured by those households in america wired directly to the Nielsen Rating Service. a rating point is one percent of the total available number of tv hourseholds(77 million)
NFL regionalized: New England Patriots-Dallas Cowboys
Sunday, 4:30 EDT
18.5 Rating (14.2 million homes)
CBS
CBS' highest-rated
regular-season game since 1998.
MLB playoffs: Cleveland Indians-Boston Red Sox
Saturday, 8
7.0 (5.4 million)
Fox
Even with 2006 coverage of Detroit Tigers-Oakland Athletics.
College football: LSU-Kentucky
Saturday, 3:30
4.4 (3.4 million)
CBS
MLB playoffs: Arizona Diamondbacks-Colorado Rockies
Sunday 8pm EDT
3.5 (2.7 million)
TBS
Down 39% from comparable St. Louis Cardinals-New York Mets on Fox last year.TBS is almost certain to finish with the lowest prime-time LCS ratings ever.
But we will always have that game under the umbrellas to remember.