Our home town baseball team has set a new record – not just the worst record in the majors, although with a .323 percentage and 107 losses this season they have locked up the chance to pick first in the draft for the third year in a row – now we learn that nobody is watching them play.
Nobody – not even when they could be watching at home for free!
Here’s the story from Mark Duncan of the Associated Press:
According to television’s official scorekeeper, nobody in the 20-county Greater Houston area watched the Astros’ game Sunday at Cleveland.
The score was 9-2 in favor of the Indians on the scoreboard and 0.0 for Comcast SportsNet Houston — the regional network owned by the Astros, Rockets and NBC Sports Group — in the daily report compiled by the Nielsen Co., which measures television viewing levels.
It was the first time in Houston, where games have been broadcast on cable outlets since 1983, and perhaps the first time in the history of Major League Baseball that an MLB game had no measurable viewership in its home market.
By comparison, Nielsen reported that the Texans’ loss at Baltimore had a 23.0 rating, which equates to an average audience of 526,553 of Houston’s 2.28 million TV households, on KHOU (Channel 11).
Nielsen’s figures are, however, subject to challenge on a number of fronts. For one thing, the company’s business is based on the concept that Nielsen can measure what millions of television viewers are watching by monitoring the behavior of hundreds.
On Sunday, Nielsen had reports from 581 meters in Greater Houston. In any given quarter-hour between noon and 3 p.m. Sunday, anywhere from 47.6 to 52.6 percent of those meters (roughly 270 to 300) were in use by viewers watching television, but none of them were tuned to the Astros game.
Of course, there may have been a few watching the game at sports bars. Then again, they may have been Cleveland fans, or if they had a craving for hot wings and beer, they may not have had a choice.
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