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| No one's watching this. (Getty Images) |
It scarcely needs to be pointed out that the Astros are not good this season. Not at all. Toe-deep in what figures be a long and grueling, top-down organizational makeover, this year's Astros model is on pace for 111 losses, outscored by more than 200 runs, and 11-43 since the break. Again: Not good.
It's little surprise, then, that the Astros' TV ratings aren't particularly impressive. Perhaps, though, "unimaginably dismal" is a better way to characterize Sunday's Nielsen output. From the Houston Chronicle:
The Astros’ win over the Reds generated the lowest rating, as far as can be determined, in the history of the team’s presence on Fox Sports Houston and its predecessor networks.
It generated – if that’s the word – a 0.05 rating, which means it was viewed by an average audience of 1,092 households. It only generated a measurable rating in four quarter-hour periods, and it was never viewed during any 15-minute period by more than 0.18 percent of the area’s 2.1 million TV households.
There are all sorts of reasons MLB television ratings can't be compared to, say, NFL ratings on an apples-to-apples basis. NFL games are largely confined to the weekend and generally played during "let us please go indoors" kind of weather, and they play roughly 10 percent of the games that MLB does. Still, context provides no way to explain away what the Astros' telecast wrought on Sunday.
If you like, think of it as the television-ratings equivalent of Terry Funk vs. Jerry Lawler ...
(HT: Zachary Levine)
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