The Major League Baseball All Star Game drew its second lowest rating ever, scoring an 8.4/15. The record low is an 8.1 rating for the 2005 edition. The 8.4 rating is down 10% from a 9.3 last year, but was good enough to draw the highest rating for any network television event since the season finale of House in late May.
The 8.4 puts the All Star Game behind the final round of The Masters and the entire Final Four, but ahead of the NBA Finals — which drew a record low 6.2 average rating (with a peak of 6.5 for Game 4) last June. 2007 marks the sixth consecutive year that the MLB All Star Game failed to draw a double digit rating.
While ratings for the Midsummer Classic continue to be way off from previous years, MLB can be satisfied with beating the Pro Bowl by 83% (8.4 to 4.6) and the NBA All Star Game by 100% (8.4 to 4.2). Bear in mind that the NBA All Star Game aired on cable, and the 4.2 rating is the adjusted final national rating (the game drew a 5.1 final cable rating).
As speculated earlier, NBC’s half-hour reality competition “The Singing Bee” defeated the game in total viewers, 13.1 million to 12.5 million. Media Life Magazine reported this earlier, though the Sports Business Daily had a conflicting — and evidently erroneous — report which said the game was the “most-watched TV event since the ‘American Idol’ season finale“.
