NEW YORK (MainStreet) – Major League Baseball is a step away from the World Series, but has shown only one postseason game on network television.

Baseball's Wild Card games and Divisional Series were shown on four different networks this fall: ESPN (DIS) - Get Report , TBS (TWX) , MLB Network and Fox Sports 1 (FOXA) - Get Report . The first network broadcast didn't show up until Game 1 of the National League Championship Series on Saturday and there won't be another one until Game 6 of the series next Saturday or Game 1 of the World Series on Tuesday, when Fox takes over broadcast duties for the World Series.

The NLCS between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals features the winners of four of the past eight World Series. The American League Championship Series between the Baltimore Orioles and Kansas City Royals features two teams who haven't been to the World Series since 1983 or 1985, respectively. How are these games not being broadcast to the largest audience possible?

Because that audience isn't so big anymore, and the networks know it. In 2013, according to Nielsen, Major League Baseball averaged roughly 700,000 viewers per game. That's about half of the 1.4 million who watched National Basketball Association games and just above the 500,000 who watch National Hockey League games. It is nowhere close to the 17.7 million per-game average for the National Football League, but few sporting events other than this year's U.S. men's soccer team games at the World Cup are.

Baseball's premier events don't fare much better. The average audience for the All-Star Game dropped from a high of nearly 14 million in 2004 to roughly 11 million a decade later. The World Series, meanwhile, saw its ratings drop from 25.4 million for the Boston Red Sox first win since 1918 to just 14.9 million for their latest World Series win just a year ago.

During last year's World Series, Nielsen said the average viewer was 54.4 years old. That's up from 44.8 in 1991 and is more than 16 years older than the median age of the U.S. population at large. With help from competing forms of entertainment, the World Series' biggest audience has collapsed from the 55 million who watched Game 7 in 1986 to the 18 million that watched last year's deciding Game 6.

It's not that people don't want to watch baseball. For one, the more than nearly 74 million people who attended games last year was the seventh-highest total of all time (though 0.4% lower than 2012). Average attendance of 30,458 is nearly 10,000 more than it was 30 years ago and higher than it was even 10 years ago.

Nobody want to watch baseball on television anymore, though, which presents a bit of a problem for networks. In 2012, ESPN agreed pay MLB $700 million a year for eight years for both broadcast and digital rights to game broadcasts and for the right to broadcast one wild card game each year, as it did with the National League's installment this year. Fox, meanwhile, just started an eight-year deal that pays Major League Baseball $500 million per year for rights to regular season games, playoff games, the World Series and the All-Star Game. Baseball gave the last chunk of its national broadcasts to Turner this year and will charge it $300 million each season for the next eight years in exchange for better playoff access.

Between the three companies, Major League Baseball's playoff games have little less than 4 million viewers per game through each league's Division Series. Those are great numbers for cable, where Wild Card and Division Series games accounted for four of the Top 6 shows for the week ending Oct. 6, but those numbers aren't nearly as great for broadcast television. Consider that a rerun of the CBS sitcom Big Bang Theory drew 4 million that same week, while the show's season premier drew 6 million — more than any MLB playoff game that aired to that point. In fact, on network television, only three MLB playoff games — its two Wild Card games and Game 1 of the Division Series between the Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim on TBS — would have found a place in the Top 10.

That puts baseball behind the NBA, which averaged 4.3 million viewers per game on TNT through the second round of its own playoff series earlier this year, and well behind the average 34.3 million viewers the NFL drew to broadcast television for its division playoffs in January. But it gives ESPN, Turner and Fox a strengthened cable presence at a time the WWE and football are about the only sure things on the schedule.

All three are battling to secure their sports ecosystems and keep competitors from poaching sports properties. On top of baseball, ESPN is paying$1.9 billion a year through 2021 to host the National Football League's Monday Night Football, $7.2 billion exclusive rights to college football's playoffs through 2026 and millions more in deals with college football's Atlantic Coast Conference ($3.6 billion), Southeast Conference ($2.3 billion), Big 12 ($2.5 billion), PAC-12 ($3 billion) and Big 10 ($1 billion).

It's sharing Major League Soccer and U.S. national team duties with Fox in a $600 million deal that runs through 2026 and has rights to NBA games that will cost it $3.9 billion through 2016. It's also locked up Wimbledon, the French Open, the U.S. Open and the Australian Open as well as golf's Masters Tournament.

Fox, meanwhile, took a sledgehammer to its sports operations last year and came out looking a whole lot like ESPN's ecosystem. Fox Sports Network was replaced with Fox Sports 1. FuelTV turned into Fox Sports 2. Fox Soccer disappeared completely, with its programming shifted over to Fox Sports 1 and 2, but the Fox Soccer Plus channel remained. It just paid $400 million to snatch the World Cup away from ESPN in 2018 and 2022 and teamed with NBC to take NASCAR away from ESPN in a 10-year, $8.2 billion deal that starts next year.

Fox is also trying to corner the market on global soccer by securing the rights to the German Bundesliga soccer league, grabbing exclusive rights to the UEFA Champions League and nailing down the CONCACAF Gold Cup through 2015. Combined with its NFL, MLB, NASCAR, Ultimate Fighting Championship, college football conference championships and PAC-12 and Big East basketball championships, those soccer buys take dead aim at ESPN's crowded lineup and bet big on soccer's young and growing demographic.

Turner, meanwhile, is carving out its own corner of the cable sports landscape. Back in 2010, the NCAA reached a 14-year, $10.8 billion television agreement with CBS and Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting to show every game live on CBS, TBS, TNT and TruTV. As of 2012, the broadcast partners' March Madness Live app streamed every game of the tournament over mobile devices.

Turner is paying a steep price for its holdings, however, as it had to lay off 10% of its staff on the same day it announced a nine-year, $24 billion joint deal with ABC and ESPN for NBA broadcast rights.

All three of these networks still think playoff baseball has inherent value to fans and viewers. Those broadcasts are just more valuable to the companies as well-watched cornerstones of multichannel subscription-based sports empires than they are as widely viewed, ad-driven giveaways on over-the-air television.

— By Jason Notte for MainStreet

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