Then there were the home viewers; tens of thousands of Washingtonians were no doubt flipping back and forth, or setting up multiple televisions in the same room, or watching one game on a TV and the other on an iPad.

Still, we all were curious about the ratings. And so here they are. Preliminary overnight Nielsen ratings show that an average of something like 740,000 viewers watched the Redskins-Ravens Fox broadcast in the Washington market, while an average of something like 135,000 viewers watched the Nats-Dodgers broadcast on FS1.

AD

AD

The Skins game peaked at more than a million viewers. The Nats game peaked at about 200,000 viewers. The Skins game got an average household rating of about 20.6. The Nats game got an average household rating of about 3.9.

Now, there are a million caveats to all of this. The Nats game was on cable, while the Redskins game was on network TV. The Nats game was rescheduled hastily and may not have even been on TV guides, while the Redskins game went on as planned. The D.C. TV market includes Frederick, where there are Baltimore fans who would care about the football game and not the baseball game. And the baseball game was at home while the football game was away. In many ways, this was a worst-case scenario for the Nats.

Still, the (preliminary) numbers are what they are, and they brought to mind Sunday’s New York Times piece about changes in D.C. sports. One excerpt:

On a day when their Nationals played the Los Angeles Dodgers — and lost — to begin a National League division series, the 43,000-plus people packing the stands didn’t go wild for their hometown football star. Instead, they let out muted cheers mixed with boos. Given the reshuffling hierarchy of sports teams in this city, the reaction of the fans made perfect sense. These days, this longstanding football town is beginning to look an awful lot like an up-and-coming baseball town.

We’ve heard about this reshuffling for years, and I think parts of it are very real and very tangible. Things have changed in this city, and things have changed among its fans.

Still, I wouldn’t say the hierarchy is completely reshuffled just yet.