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October 7, 2015
As Cleveland Indians fans are relegated to watching the Kansas City Royals represent the AL Central in the 2015 MLB postseason, more than one-third stopped watching their own team from a season ago. Crain’s Cleveland reports that the Tribe’s 2015 viewership ratings on local FOX Sports affiliate SportsTime Ohio dropped more than 35 percent from a year earlier, the second-largest drop in all of baseball.
Here’s Kevin Kleps:
The Tribe’s viewership decrease on SportsTime Ohio was the second-largest in baseball, and occurred after a 2014 season in which the Indians’ local ratings cracked the top five.
But the numbers are anything but surprising.
As we wrote in July, yet another slow start by the Tribe, combined with the Cavs playing deep into June, made this the most likely scenario.
During a 45-game stretch from April 19 to June 16, 13 Indians prime-time broadcasts went head-to-head with a Cavs playoff game. Three of the 13 were NBA Finals games — contests that generated an average rating of 43.7 in the Cleveland designated market.
The Tribe’s ratings on SportsTime Ohio dipped in June and July, when the Indians were a combined 24-28 and fell six games under .500 on the season. After winning two of their first three games of the season, the Indians weren’t over .500 again until Sept. 26, the 153rd game of the season, and they were under .500 until Sept. 13, the 140-game mark.
The final tally: a 3.93 average rating and 36% drop from the 2014 norm of 6.1, which ranked fifth in MLB.
In 2013, where the Indians capitalized on a second-half run for the ages and ultimately made the one-game AL Wild Card game, they pulled in a rating of 5.5. The next season, building off of that momentum and an “unfinished business” campaign, the team saw their ratings improve to 6.1. Failing to make the postseason in 2015 and doing very little in the offseason to spurn excitement, with additions of Brandon Moss and Gavin Floyd doing little in the way of headlines. Couple off of this with an abysmal start in April and May along with the fan fare surrounding the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the Indians apparently dug themselves into a hole out of which even Francisco Lindor couldn’t help dig out.
According to Crain’s, the 3.9 ratings average for 2015 is the lowest since 2012—the same year that the Tribe was 68-94 and Manny Acta was fired with six games remaining in the season.
37 Comments
Uh-oh even people at home didn’t pay attention. Maybe they thought is was a repeat!
Are those numbers “start-to-finish” or do they capture casual viewers who flipped over to check it out? I know I was very guilty from April-July of watching 3 innings and switching it off because “I knew” we’d never make up the two-run deficit we’d dug ourselves into. Would I count as a viewer since I only watched a third of the game? Based on conversations with coworkers I feel like this was the norm for viewers throughout much of the season.
Exactly – the team started slow, they refused to call up their hyped prospects (Lindor, Urshela) until later on, and once the fans emerged from the cloud of the NBA Playoffs, looked around, it was the same tired team with Swisher, Bourn, no fun prospects, struggling and not fun to watch.
It is imperative that the Tribe gets off to a strong start next year. I’m talking a 20-10 first 30 games. Combine that with a long-term team finally starting to take some shape – Kip-Lindor-Brantley may be the best top 3rd in baseball. Fantastic rotation of Kluber-Carrasco-Anderson-Salazar-(Bauer/Tomlin/House) – get one goddamn good signing for someone to bat cleanup and that viewership will skyrocket again.
Agreed. I never thought they were a legit world series contender, but I didn’t think we’d have a first half of nigh unwatchable baseball. I think this is the first season in about 5 years that I didn’t attend a single game. And I probably only watched a few at the beginning of the year on TV. Even though they made a nice little run at the end of the season, you were hoping against hope that they’d win enough to make the play offs.
A 35% drop is pretty serious.
Man, if LeBron hadn’t come back, this town would be a sports wasteland. Of course, that wouldn’t be something new here.
Is above .500, even if just a hair, a product really unworthy of being watched? I get that they weren’t going to the playoffs, but why can’t the watching/supporting of this team be middle of the pack when they are a middle of the pack team?
The trends speak for themselves. This city isn’t going to watch/attend without an exciting, game-winning product. The question of worth is fair—poor word choice on my part. Doesn’t change the fact that fans have more or less spoken.
No, the product itself is not worthy of going unwatched, but it’s kind of like a television show. When you care about a show, and feel people are screwing around with it too much behind the scenes, you stop watching. It might still be good, and watchable, but you can tune out.
I think there are more complex dynamics going on than that, but I agree that an 81 win team still won 81 times, and that’s hardly unwatchable. Maybe it was an overreaction to the Cavs excitement level, and maybe it was the fans not noticing the decent baseball when it started happening, or maybe Scott is right that you can’t botch the first two months if you want to get a fan base with waning interest to buy in. However, I’ll admit that when the team played terrible defense and displayed miserable clutch hitting in the first half of the year, I found it pretty tough to stay engaged – and I love baseball. It was just not a very entertaining brand of it. Once Urshela and Lindor came up, and then especially when Chisenhall moved to right field, I enjoyed watching the team thoroughly. I know, they were winning more often and all, but it’s also a lot more fun to watch a young team playing great defense and hitting well, and sometimes getting beaten anyway because the pitchers are struggling, than it is to watch a parade of 0-1 losses with 18 runners stranded and 3 errors, and the occasional 9-1 win sprinkled in there.
Of course the elephant in the room is that OTHER cities do watch mediocre teams, and do so in much greater numbers than Clevelanders have lately. That’s why we’re really all worried about this. I’m not saying we’ve reached any kind of critical juncture, but I will say that the danger zone looms not that far off.
LeBron is the only superstar, megastar and has been the last decade + this speaks to the problems the Cleveland sports teams have become.
Like I said the new old front office is standing at a make or break point. I will be interested to see what if anything they do about it because as you say they actually have a product it just needs a little refining and fine tuning. Will they try or will they once again for another winter just sit back and hope?
“It’s the first two months that are most important.”
Bad early months didn’t hurt the ratings in 2014.
2015
Apr/May record: 24-26
Final record: 81-80
TV rating (season): 3.9
2014
Apr/May record: 26-30
Final record: 85-77
TV rating (season): 6.1
“Once July hits, it’s NFL season. If the team isn’t in contention by then, a good chunk stop watching.”
Again, comparing 2014 and 2015 suggests that this isn’t true and doesn’t explain the fall from 2014 to 2015.
2015
July 1st: 36-41; 9.0 GB
2014
July 1st: 40-43, 7.5 GB
When it comes to Cleveland support of the Indians, can we please stop shoehorning in a narrative? The reasons people do/don’t watch/attend Indians games are legion, as are the factors that influences those decisions. I think we can agree that middling results and slow starts certainly don’t help, but claiming there is direct correlation between that and ratings is not supported by the numbers.
Between ratings and missing the playoffs by a few games hopefully they remember to show up all year next time.
What exactly are the trends?
We’re talking about a four win difference between two clubs that followed VERY similar trajectories in terms of record. I’m failing to understand how you can look at the TV ratings in 2014 and 2015 and then come to the conclusion that “This city isn’t going to watch/attend without an exciting, game winning product.” We didn’t have that in 2014 either, yet a whole lot more people watched.
Didn’t happen this year. Or last (a year after we made the playoffs).
Not to sound like a broken record player, but every season people trot out a variety of theories to explain low ratings, attendance, whatever…. and none of these theories ever hold up under scrutiny.
“Spend more and people will come…” Well, actually no. Cause if you look at these years…..
“Win in the first two months and people will watch….” Well, if you look here…..
“Be competitive by late summer and….” Funny you should mention it, because a few years ago…
And instead of just saying – “look, there’s a lot of stuff going on here. Winning and payroll and record and weather and the Cavs and Browns and all this other stuff play some kind of part” – people keep trying to distill it down to one hot-take, sound bite explanation that goes along with whatever they happen to believe.
Here is my explanation (based on what I observed, not on hard data):
(1) LeBron’s Cavs title runs took away some fans
(2) Indians slow start took away even more fans (didn’t want to harsh their buzz from the Finals run)
(3) Cavs run ended just in time for Lindor to come up and the Indians won 9 of 12 games into early July (spike)
(4) Indians proceeded to fall on their face after that run. 7-13 from July 4 through July 28. They were 9 games under .500 and 16 games back of KC.
(5) Veteran firesale at and after trade deadline.
(6) 16-12 in August and 14-13 in September were too modest of “winning” months to really excite anybody no matter how much other teams fell over themselves to keep the Indians in the AL Wild Card race.
I love that we kept in contention and appreciate we ended with a winning record, but if someone would have laid out how the season went, then I would not have been surprised at the attendance or ratings (given the bandwagon nature of baseball fans in the city).
I see your point, I personally didn’t tune in til they started playing better.
I’ve also thought that the Royals running away with the race didn’t help. In 2014, we were in the race for the Wild Card and the Central.
But again, these are just possible explanations. Yes, they’re logically sound, but they’re still just guesses. The truth is that there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason when comparing year-to-year ratings to the Tribe’s record.
Honestly, as much as I like baseball, I don’t see how anybody can watch more than one game a week. Highlights? Recaps? An inning here or there? Sure.
But a whole game? Or a whole season worth of games?
That’s 162 opportunities to spend 3+ hours of your life watching a team that, even in the best of circumstances, will lose 40% of the time.
If baseball did not already exist as a sport, there is ZERO chance that it would be viable in the modern world.
not only lose 40% of the time, but each individual pitch is only going to end in an outcome you are excited about what % of time? an actual out if you are cheering defense or a BB, HBP, Hit if you are cheering offense. miniscule compared to other sports.
why I love it though. best nights are when I listen to Hammy on the way to LL games, coach the game, then watch the rest of the game + highlights getting home from it.
MLB.tv app is worn out by the time the season ends.
I rant, but, if I didn’t have a significant other who hated baseball (along with more time in my day) I would probably watch/listen a whole lot more.
Honestly, I thought from the very beginning that we would finish last. The only reason we didn’t is because the call ups and trades mid season gave the team enough electric shock to keep the patient alive until the twins mercifully snuffed them out.
they’ll look at the other side of that coin and say: 81-80….we underachieved a bit, for sure. but we were 4 games from the playoffs. If we go into the next season with Lindor instead of Jose Ramirez, there’s our 4 games right there.
you know that’s how they’re looking at it.
yep. unwatchable if Kluber wasn’t pitching or if Lindor wasn’t playing. The offense looked like March or April even in June or July.
forget about the record – they weren’t fun to watch. that’s what matters. There’s no Belle, no Vizquel, no Baerga – no personality. There’s nobody who gets you excited other than Lindor.
Brantley is boring. Kluber is uber-boring. they’re both good, but they both don’t have any personality so nobody can (or even wants to) relate to them. Empathy is a powerful device in any of life’s endeavors.
It’s going to sound like a blanket statement but I’ll give you a 25% increase in attendance if you show me some upgraded public transportation. Keep the trains running til 2am. expand the reach of the RTA on game night. Don’t make people park their cars in Shaker if they live in Solon.
I promise you, if Clevelanders had a better transportation option they would flock downtown. I just hope they move down there after this current renaissance. I hope it can be a great place to live.
OT, but I thought Carrasco was the most fun pitcher to watch this year. On some nights he was just unbelievable. What a turnaround for his career! If Salazar continues his good development from this year the Indians will present a formidable playoff rotation if they make it in some day.
If Lebron hadn’t come back I think there’s a fair chance we would have spent more time agonizing over the Indians terrible start. It’s easy to forget how obsessed we were with basketball last spring.
If this team won a handful more games and made the wild card game, I’d guess that suddenly people would have found them fun to watch a couple nights ago.
It seems that the dividing line between “fun” and “not fun” or whatever other goalposts are set up to be moved as the Indians approach them boils down to “are they in the playoffs, or all but assured of being in them or not”. When they are, the place is packed, when they’re not, its absolutely empty. I really don’t see how there’s a middle ground anywhere for this team, and I don’t see how that’s going to be sustainable for this market in a sport that has a lot of shakeup, because you can’t just draft a star QB or small forward and ensure contention for 5-10 years.
At what point can we hold the broadcast even partially responsible for poor viewership? Underwood is horrible, and I grow more tired of Rick Manning every season. There’s, what, roughly 10-15% of game-action in a broadcast? The rest is filled by the talking heads… that seems important.
Kluber games were the most unwatchable. He’d give up 2 runs against the other staffs’ ACE and it was game over regardless of inning. Didn’t Klubot have a complete game 1 run loss?
I loved watching Danny pitch the most 🙂
No reason all Steve, but as one who watches a lot of Indians games (and pays MLB.com to do it, on top of it all), this year’s team in the first three or four months was just dead boring. Really, really boring.
I’m in the same boat as you, this was a frustrating team to spend a lot of time, money, and energy on. Not as frustrating as, say, some other team in town, but frustrating nonetheless. But the 2013 team didn’t have any more personality, and suddenly people found them fun to watch on tv, and at the park, at least for one night in October.
People got in the habit of not going. Really, it’s about that easy. For nearly seven decades there was a massive stadium, so buying in advance wasn’t necessary and for at least half of those decades, the team usually wasn’t in contention. So nobody in April buys tickets for what they figure ought to be a big game in July. They’ll wait to see how badly/well the team is doing before they even think of it. I would bet percentage wise Indians attendance is more of a last-minute decision than any other team in the majors. The Indians really ought to initiate deep discounted tickets, April to June to re-develop a base for the rest of the year, and to acknowledge it’s usually cold out there.
So why don’t they walk up and get tickets when the team is in contention? Your theory would seem to suggest that when the Indians are doing well, they’ll absolutely fill the park. But they didn’t. Not in 2013, nor 2007 when they had the best record in baseball.
As far as deep discounts? What if tickets in April were half the price of August? Would that work? Because the team already does that.