A Sun Times article today paints a bad picture of Chicago professional baseball.
Jackie Robinson West All-Stars, a local team performing the Little League World Series, are crushing the pro teams when it comes to TV ratings.
The pre-teens’ Sunday afternoon battle against Las Vegas’ Mountain
Ridge scored a 4.6 rating for WLS-Channel 7, according to ABC.
That means about 161,000 households in the Chicago market watched
Jackie Robinson West fall 13-2 in their first defeat of the Little
League tournament.
The White Sox faced off against Toronto at the same time Sunday in a game televised on WGN-Channel 9.The Sox game had a 1.0 rating, or about 35,000 local households — less than a quarter of the number tuned into the Little League game.
The Cubs didn’t fare a whole lot better than the Sox — ratings wise
— in their game against the Mets, which started a bit earlier Sunday at
12:10 p.m. Shown on Comcast SportsNet Chicago, that game drew a 1.6
rating, or 56,000 households in the Chicago market.
Jackie Robinson West, the first all-black team to make it to the
Little League World Series in three decades, notched a 2.4 rating on
ESPN Thursday for its tournament opener at Lamade Stadium in South
Williamsport, Pennsylvania. This rating still outpaces the CSN ratings for this season for Cubs (1.5) and Sox (1.4) telecasts.
It is apparent that Chicago baseball fans would rather watch little leaguers than major leaguers. JRW is a great news and feature story, and there are probably a lot of bandwagon jumpers watching them on television. But that is the point: people will watch winning teams play baseball.
