Depending on your point of view, the first game of the Colorado Rockies/Arizona Diamondbacks National League Championship Series either turned in a strong performance or was a major dud for TBS.
The 5-1 Colorado win drew a 3.6 final national rating with 5.3 million viewers on TBS Thursday night. The 5.3 million viewers makes the game the seventh-most viewed postseason telecast on TBS this year, behind six of the seven ALDS games.
The 3.6 rating is the lowest ever for a prime-time LCS game, and is tied with Game 3 of the ’05 NLCS as the lowest rated League Championship Series game since at least 2002. That can easily be explained by the fact that the game aired on cable; there is no truly fair comparison between an event on broadcast and an event on cable.
While the 3.6 may be a primetime record low, the rating is another strong performance for TBS. On cable, a 3.6 rating is often good enough to finish in the top five highest rated events of the week. And the 5.3 million viewers compares favorably to sister network TNT’s coverage of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals (which averaged 5 million viewers over six games) and NASCAR (which averaged 5.8 million viewers over six races).
