Amid NFL Excuses, TV Viewership Improves 95% for Astros-Yankees over Last Season’s ALCS

The Associated Press
The Associated Press

As liberals pretend half-empty NFL stadiums and falling TV ratings have nothing to do with President Donald Trump calling out national anthem protests, the New York Daily News reports the Yankees-Astros American League Championship Series averaged 95 percent more viewers than last year’s clash for the pennant between the Cleveland Indians and Toronto Blue Jays.

Fox Sports 1 topped out with a record 12 million viewers.

The huge jump in people choosing to watch baseball at the same time so many fewer fans went to NFL stadiums or turned on NFL games occurs as baseball players do not participate in protests during the national anthem criticized by Trump.

For decades, NFL TV audiences dwarfed baseball audiences. But 12 million watching baseball on a cable channel that many hotels do not even carry approaches dangerously close to the 15.1 million NFL TV audience average for the first five weeks this season, a figure down from 18.4 million for the same Week 1-5 period just two years ago according to the Sporting News.

While Fox will show the World Series starting with the Tuesday 5:08 p.m. Pacific Time first pitch by Clayton Kershaw to the Houston Astros, the record setting Astros-Yankees averaged 6.52 million fans throughout the seven-game series before setting the station record with an average 9.92 million for the final game peaking near 12 million at 11 p.m. Eastern. It was the most fans to watch a league championship series since 2010, when 11.64 million watched on Fox.

Even guests within a few blocks of Houston’s Minute Made Park expressed frustration that their hotels could not air the game. But the fact that almost 12 million fans found the game this weekend just three years after the Astros drew a TV audience of, well, 0.0 in their own market, according to Nielson, seems to indicate baseball could be one of the beneficiaries of rejecting the football protests.

Unlike football, apparently only one major league player, from the 75-87 Oakland Athletics who finished 26 games behind the Astros and did not come close to making the playoffs, took a knee this season. And unlike most football players he kept his hand on his heart. On the flip side, Breitbart Sports reported on league championship MVP Justin Verlander and his fiance Kate Upton, who criticized the football protesters.

The news is fairly straight-forward: a record viewership for a league that stands for the anthem and plunging attendance and viewership for a league that allows protests of the national anthem despite banning every other attempt at making statements, including attempted demonstrations against domestic abuse and helmet decals honoring fallen law enforcement officers.

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