Diamondbacks' Game 2 win least-watched World Series game on record

Although their fans are filling up the home ballparks, the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks aren't drawing viewers to the 2023 World Series.

According to Nielsen ratings made available on Tuesday morning, the Diamondbacks' Game 2 win to tie the series was the lowest rated and least viewed World Series on record. Just 8.18 million viewers watched the second game in Texas, registering a 4.0 rating. (Ratings are a percentage of all television households in a given geography - in this case, the United States.)

That dubious mark was previously held by 2020 World Series Game 3 between the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers, which garnered a 4.3 rating and 8.3 million total viewers.

As pointed out by Sports Media Watch's Jon Lewis, the record-low game was still the most watched program of Saturday night:

Despite the sizable decline and record-low, Game 2 was still the top sporting event of the day — topping the Georgia-Florida college football game on CBS earlier in the day (3.0, 5.95M). The college football competition was nonetheless stiff, as Ohio State-Wisconsin on NBC (2.6, 4.87M) and Colorado-UCLA on ABC (2.6, 4.66M) combined to average 9.53 million in the competing Saturday night window.

It's fair to wonder, however, if in addition to the competition, there's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at hand. Despite the strong numbers of the League Championship Series round entering the World Series, much of the immediate reaction - at least on social media - was less about the excitement of fresh faces in the Fall Classic and much more about the perceived lack of interest outside of Texas and Arizona. That neither team came into the playoffs as a perennial contender may have dampened excitement for those who don't pay as much attention to them during the regular season.

As much as many have pointed to market size, Dallas-Fort Worth is the fifth-biggest media market in the country, with a half-million more television households than both Houston and Atlanta, cities that have hosted four of the last six World Series. Also, the Dallas metroplex has just 70,000 fewer TV households than Philadelphia, the country's fourth-largest city which hosted last season's Fall Classic. (Phoenix is 11th.)

Besides, the "bubble" World Series featured Los Angeles and Boston, second and ninth in market size, respectively.

As per custom with Nielsen, ratings for Monday evening's Game 3 will be released Tuesday afternoon. In relation to other sporting events, that game went against a "Monday Night Football" matchup between the Las Vegas Raiders and Detroit Lions that looked better on paper than in reality. Game 3 also competed with WWE's "Monday Night Raw," which generally has around 1 million viewers every week, and local sports from the NHL and NBA.