PHILLIES HIGH RATINGS ACCORDING TO NEW YOUK DAILY NEWS

This from a New York Newspaper

As a TV Market, Los Angeles Is Staggering in the Playoffs
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: October 19, 2009

With both Los Angeles area teams in the league championship series, you might expect that fans there, in the nation’s second-largest market, would watch in mass quantities.
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O.K., it could not have been easy for local fans to watch the Angels lose their first two games to the Yankees and the Dodgers lose two out of three to the Phillies.

But the story is that the Los Angeles market is being drubbed by New York and Philadelphia. Maybe it’s the old time-zone thing that limits viewership in the West Coast because what starts at 8 o’clock in New York begins at 5 in Santa Monica. Perhaps Angelenos have more amusing diversions. Maybe it’s the cold and the rain in the East keeping fans inside.

Or maybe old baseball cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia tend to support their teams in greater numbers.

First, to the National League Championship Series on TBS. The Los Angeles market peaked with a 10.9 rating for the Dodgers’ Game 1 loss to the Phillies, according to Nielsen Media figures. That game showed substantial growth during the game, with the rating more than doubling to a 14.8 in the late innings from a 7.1 early on. But the Dodgers’ afternoon victory in Game 2 produced a 5.9, and Sunday night’s 11-0 loss generated just a 7.3.

A closer look at Game 3 reveals a well-earned dissatisfaction among hometown Dodgers fans as the debacle unfolded. The game peaked at a 9.6 locally (or 543,000 households) from 8:15 to 8:30 p.m. Eastern — it had barely begun — and as the Phillies took a 6-0 lead in the second inning, the rating tumbled until it finished with a 4.3 (242,000 homes).

One-quarter of all TV homes have been watching the games in Philadelphia. The game-by-game ratings there would please Ben Franklin: Game 1, a 27.7; Game 2, a 22.2; and Game 3, a 29.1.

It’s not easy for a market with 2.95 million TV homes to beat one with nearly twice as many, but that’s what Philadelphia has been doing to Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles market is losing to New York in the Angels-Yankees American League Championship Series on Fox, but not as sharply. For Game 1, the New York rating of a 17.4 (1.3 million homes) was 83 percent better the 9.1 (or 514,000 homes) in Los Angeles. For the 13-inning Game 2, which started in late afternoon on the West Coast, the Los Angeles market produced a 10.8 (610,000 homes) and New York a 19.3 (1.4 million).

The Yankees’ 4-3 win over the Angels in Game 2 demonstrated that a game that ends after 1 a.m. in the East would not exhaust viewership, at least in the teams’ markets. In the last half-hour of the game, the rating in Los Angeles broke the 15.0 level for the only time in the series, and the game was being seen by 874,000 homes at 10 p.m. Pacific.

At the same time, in New York, the local rating had sagged a little from its height at about 11:15 p.m. Eastern, but was still a 20.3 with 1.5 million households watching.

The Los Angeles market’s behavior is not an aberration. During last year’s N.L.C.S., also between the Dodgers and the Phillies, the five games averaged a 10.7 in the Los Angeles market — and a 25.9 in Philadelphia.

And when the Angels played the White Sox in the 2005 A.L.C.S., the games rated an average 15.8 in Los Angeles — and a 26.4 in Chicago.

BASEBALL VS. FOOTBALL On a weekend with the Yankees playing an epic game Saturday night and the Giants and the Jets losing Sunday afternoon, which did best in the local ratings? The Yankees, with the 19.3, beat the 16.2 for the Saints’ rout of the Giants and the astonishing 17.1 for the achingly awful Jets loss to Buffalo.

The Jets broadcast, on CBS, had the benefit of starting at 4:15 p.m. Eastern. It lasted four numbing hours and finished around 8:15. I know the masochism of being a Jets fan; I sometimes admit that I am one. But so many viewers stood by for so long that you’d have thought Woody Johnson was slashing the prices of personal seat licenses. The rating for the game pushed past a 21.2 at 7:30, climbed to a 22.5 at 7:45 and ended with a 23.5.

The game could prompt aggrieved fans to file a class-action suit to be compensated for the time spent waiting fruitlessly for a victory. A creative lawyer might ponder a test case of 5,000 fans whose pain and suffering is worth $50 for each of the four hours of viewing. Imagine the fun. It could start a movement.

E-mail: sandor@nytimes.com