Little love for Toronto FC on television -- yet

The CBC had better be right about Major League Soccer.

The people's network recently jettisoned the Raptors because it felt ratings weren't quite good enough to justify those weekend time slots. On the other hand, it expressed deep and abiding love for Toronto FC, which would give its left halfback to get the kind of ratings the Raptors drew.

Witness Saturday's poor draw, the latest in a series of poor ratings for the MLS club.Since its inception, the Toronto team has been a major hit at the gate and a semi-disaster on television.

But this isn't a case of the CBC not realizing that ratings aren't calculated like golf. Low numbers are bad, not good, in the TV game.

The CBC's faith in TFC stems from its belief that adding two more teams in Canada over the next two years will ignite interest in MLS. A Toronto team that barely draws flies on television will see ratings soar once it has more Canadian rivals in Vancouver and Montreal is how the CBC sees it.

It could happen. But it also could be a repeat of what we saw when there were two NBA franchises here: Apathy.

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the CFL continues to dominate the summer ratings, though a near perfect game and a late playoff run by the Toronto Blue Jays helped their numbers soar.

Here are the most-watched sports events on English-language television over the weekend, according to BBM Canada overnight ratings:

1. CFL, Blue Bombers at Tiger-Cats, Saturday, TSN: 858,000

2. CFL, Roughriders at Alouettes, Friday, TSN: 853,000

3. CFL, Stampeders at Lions, Saturday, TSN: 795,000

4. MLB, Rays at Blue Jays, Sunday, Sportsnets: 760,000

5. CFL, Argonauts at Eskimos, Friday, TSN: 649,000

6. MLB, Rays at Blue Jays, Saturday, Sportsnet: 493,000

7. Auto racing, NASCAR Sprint Cup, Sunday, TSN: 448,000

8. MLB, Rays at Blue Jays, Friday, Sportsnet: 446,000*

9. PGA, Bridgestone Invitational final round, Sunday, Global/CBS: 339,000

10. NFL, Bengals vs. Cowboys, Sunday, TSN: 305,000**

11. PGA, Bridgestone Invitational third round, Saturday, Global/CBS: 255,000

12. Auto racing, NASCAR Nationwide, Satuday, TSN: 182,000

13. MLB, Red Sox at Yankees, Sundady, TSN2: 164,000

14. MLS, Chivas at Toronto FC, Saturday, CBC: 134,000

* 3 channels only

** Ratings for NBC not calculated

Comments

[Mike]

The point is this, we all recall the 250,000 people on the waiting list for tickets when these games were announced. we all recall the T.O. sport media stating that Rogers could charge anything they want for these tickets as T.O loves the NFL. well if you want the NFL in T.O you needed to support these games no matter what the price. T.O. has taken to the back of the line due to the very bad reponse these games got. Mexico city sold out a preseason NFL game in 3 hours at 101,000 people. Even in London England NFL preseason was sold out in days at very high Ticket prices (72,000). NFL just got a wake up call that T.O does not want a NFL Team. I went to the game half the people at the Dome did not even know the rules and got their tickets for nothing or 10 bucks. The movers and shakers at the NFL head office are not pleased

[Brett S]

All these NFL lovers can take their propoganda and go. The fact is, Toronto is a terrible sports city. They don't support the Jays, Argos, or these NFL games with 8 million people in the general area. If Edmonton had half the team Toronto had this year they could average 45k, and could probably sell more tickets than Toronto for those NFL games. Toronto is just a bad sports city.

[SF]

Those Jays numbers look very fishy. The Jays’ ratings have been all over the place this year from the high 500,000 range to the low 200,000s, but there’s been a quite consistent pattern. If there’s nothing else on the Jays tend to draw something over 500,000, but if there’s anything else on, particularly a CFL game, then the numbers drop way off and are often below 300,000. One exception to this happened two weeks before these numbers. The Esks had a terrible game, so bad they later held a press conference to apologise, and for that game the CFL numbers dropped to 628,000 while the Jays game on the opposite channel saw a rise to 475,000. This was a swing of about 150,000 – 200,000 from the CFL game to the Jays game, but there was still a direct relationship between the two numbers.

This week’s numbers, however, show something very different. On Friday the CFL drew its usual strong numbers, 850,000, but the Jays game drew 450,000. What is strange about this is the apparent uncoupling of the two numbers. The extra viewers for the Jays game didn’t come from the CFL game. Instead about 150,000 – 200,000 viewers seem to have appeared out of nowhere. Sunday’s Jays’ numbers show a similar thing. That game was played when there was nothing else on and typically these games draw something over 500,000 viewers, but this one drew 760,000, for a game against the Rays. Once again about 150,000 – 200,000 extra viewers seem to have appeared out of nowhere.

You might expect to see a slow growth in the Jays numbers if more people were starting to watch them, but that’s not what we see here. These numbers seem to show a sudden and very large jump for no apparent reason, and that should set off some very loud alarm bells for any statistician following these numbers.

[john brownlee]

It was nice of you to suggest in a recent column that the Blue Jays baseball commentators on television are improving. It is not noticeable.

I know a number of people who prefer to turn off the sound, and listen to the game on the radio while watching it on television. I do not do that, because the telecast and the radio broadcast are out of synchronization by about one second. I just turn off the sound.

They do this because they cannot stand Rance Mulliniks and Pat Tabler. They never shut up. They insist on discussing and predicting every single upcoming pitch; about half the time they are wrong. They insist on discussing what the batter will do on every single pitch; about half the time they are wrong.

Once they discussed how the pitchers get together to talk about the batters, their strengths and weaknesses, what pitch to throw in a particular situation. Meanwhile the camera panned four Blue Jays pitchers sitting together. Nobody was saying a word.

To say nothing of utter banality. “Shawn Cap is coming on to relieve here; he throws strikes. That is what the Blue Jays need now: a pitcher who throws strikes. “

They should take a lesson from Vin Scully who broadcasts the Dodgers games: He shuts up and just describes what is happening.

John Brownlee.