W orld Series Ratings, 2007-2011

This is an update of last year's Recent World Series Ratings post. The chart looks at all World Series 18-49 ratings game-by-game since Fox moved to the current scheduling (games on Wednesday / Thursday / Saturday / Sunday / Monday / Wednesday / Thursday). Worth noting for this year is that a weather delay pushed those last two games to Thursday and Friday.

As noted last year, these five Series clearly fall into "have" (Yankees or Red Sox) and "have-not." 2011, despite all its drama, was clearly a have-not year. Game 1 made it look like the Series had serious potential to take a step down even from the recent have-nots, but it recovered from there and was in the general 2008/2010 vicinity for the next five games.

2011's Game 7 was the first in Major League Baseball since 2002. It got bumped to a Friday and posted a 7.4 demo, just 14% higher than the 6.5 demo from Game 6. How much higher would it've been on Thursday? I'll look at that from a different angle in Notes from the Vault later this week, but here's a little perspective: the last two seven-game NBA Finals were up 44% (5.3 -> 7.6 in 2005) and 61% (7.1 -> 11.4 in 2010) from Game 6. And this year's Stanley Cup Finals Game 7 was up 70% (2.0 -> 3.4) from Game 6. The last MLB Game 7 in 2002 was up 74% (6.4 -> 11.1), but I don't think that's really fair since Game 6 was on a Saturday. The 14% certainly looks underwhelming compared with all those and would've been higher on a Thursday, but I'm still not sure it gets as high as some of those others since Game 7 was so much less dramatic than Game 6.