After a long, hot slog of a season in which thirty Major League Baseball teams play in a combined total of 2,430 games from April through September, the real fun begins with the Fall Baseball Playoffs on cable.

Which is not to dismiss the regular baseball season out-of-hand. Unlike the NBA (and the NHL for that matter), baseball does not allow over half the league’s teams to participate in post-season play, so where a baseball team finishes in the regular season carries a lot more weight! In all, just ten Major League Baseball teams make it through the regular season and into the playoffs where the vast majority of games are carried on cable.

Last season, ad-supported cable networks aired over 20 playoff games that encompassed three rounds: the Wild Card; the Division Series; and the Division Championship. Last year’s playoffs attracted very large audiences, averaging a 4.1 U.S household rating, which was good for a 6.3 share. Both metrics were more than 20% higher than year ago (2013) playoff levels:

 

“I’m Goin’ to Kansas City, Kansas City Here I Come…”

When I think of last year’s playoffs, I just can’t get that classic rhythm and blues song out of my head, “Kansas City”, (penned by the song-writing team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.) If ever there was a darling team last season, it was the Kansas City Royals — a perennial basement-dwelling team that finally made it into the playoffs and almost ran the entire table, falling just one game short in the World Series.

The Royals are a perfect illustration that our National Pastime is really a hometown sport, and when the hometown team makes the playoffs, local market ratings soar (back, back, back) way over the fence: 

 

Local Cable Advertising Demand

During last year’s playoffs (2014) nearly 250 local cable clients ordered well over 3,000 30-second spots across 59 Viamedia markets (80% of our nationwide footprint.) That comes to an average of 13 spots per client (the same amount as the prior year’s playoffs.) (Source: B.I.G.^SM   database — Copyright © 2015 by Viamedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved)

And in terms of local cable advertising categories, automotive captured the lion’s share of investments (40%), which is higher than its category share across all Viamedia clients, but by no means unusually high in the context of sporting events. What is (relatively) high is the level of political advertising — 11% of all 2014 MLB Playoff investments, and 2-to-3 times higher than what we normally see on sports programming:

 

Autumn Baseball

Here in the northeast, there are many who mark Labor Day as summer’s “last hurrah”. But I’m not one of them. You see, I’m a backyard farmer and I still have scads of green tomatoes on the vine. So, I refuse to say good-bye to summer until at least the fall Baseball Classic, which is getting off to a late start this year (tentatively, October 6^th).

As for individual teams, I’m pretty sure New York Mets and Chicago Cubs fans won’t mind the late playoff start date. Neither team has been in the playoffs for years, but it sure looks like the tide had turned in 2015 with the Mets firmly ensconced in first place and the Cubs well positioned for one of the two National League Wild Card playoff spots.

But in the end… no matter how early or how late, cable TV will take us through the entire playoffs with TBS covering all the rounds in the National League and EPSN, FOX Sports 1 and the MLB Network covering the American League.  If this year’s playoffs are anything remotely like last year’s, fans and advertisers alike are in for quite a treat!

For more information on Viamedia, visit www.viamediatv.com.

– Written by Jonathan Sims, VP Media Research, Viamedia