Speaking of Fox, boy they and TBS, must really be annoyed at the way the baseball playoffs are going. When they began two weeks ago, there were 8 teams involved, and their home cities encompassed the top 5 TV markets in the country:
# City Households % of US ------------------------------------------ 1. New York 7,375,530 6.692 2. Los Angeles 5,536,430 5.023 3. Chicago 3,430,790 3.113 4. Philadelphia 2,925,560 2.654 5. Boston 2,375,310 2.155 14. Phoenix (Arizona) 1,660,430 1.507 16. Cleveland 1,541,780 1.399 18. Denver (Colorado) 1,415,180 1.284 ------------------------------------------ 1st Round Total 26,261,010 23.787 Average 3,282,626.25 2.9725
That was pretty good news for TBS, which carried the first round of the playoffs, the Divisional Series. They had the biggest markets in the country, and a potential audience of almost a quarter of the nation's TV households.
(Unlike football, which has more of a national audience, baseball-watching on TV is primarily a local thing, because of the long season and the almost-daily games. If national coverage of baseball games is going to draw good ratings, it helps to have teams involved that come from the biggest markets, which is why you see the Mets and the Yankees in so many games covered by Fox and ESPN. By having teams from the top five markets make the post-season, TBS did pretty well.)
But what happened in the first round wasn't so good for the TV folks: the teams from the smaller markets (Boston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Denver) all beat the teams from the bigger markets (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadephia), cutting out a significant number of households for the second round, the Championship Series. Instead of having a potential audience of about 17.5% of American households, they ended up with only 6.345%.
2nd Round 6,992,700 6.345 Average 1,748,175 1.58625
TBS and Fox split the 2nd round, each doing one league, and Fox got the slightly better deal.
TBS (National League) 3,075,610 2.791 Average 1,537,805 1.3955 ------------------------------------------ Fox (American League) 3,917,090 3.554 Average 1,958,545 1.777
And what about the next and final round, the World Series, to be carried by Fox? It's too early to tell whether Boston (#5) will beat Cleveland (#16) or not (they're tied 1-1 at the moment), but in the National League, the Arizona Diamondbacks (#14) are being beaten up, 3-0, by the team with the smallest TV market in the playoffs, the Colorado Rockies (#18).
I'll bet Fox is praying right now for Boston to win, so at least Red Sox Nation will be watching the Series.
(I've picked Cleveland to win the ALCS and Colorado to win the NLCS. So far, I'm 3 for 4, having picked all the winners of the Divisional Series correctly except the New York-Cleveland series, where I picked my team, the Yankees, to win.)
absolutist
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Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
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i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
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George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
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The Coors Family
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Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
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Arthur Finkelstein
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George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
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John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
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Richard Thompson (TMLC)
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Paul Wolfowitz
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recent listening
influences
John Adams
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Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
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"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
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Richard Dawkins
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Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
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David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
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Frank Herbert
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Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
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John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
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the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
