There’s a few caveats here, but the MLB on Fox’s season debut was more or less a ratings disaster.

Fox put on a three-game, primetime regional package (St. Louis-Cincinnati appeared in 39% of markets) and drew 1.8 million viewers this Saturday. According to the excellent Sports Media Watch, it could be the lowest audience for a primetime baseball broadcast. Ever. MLB on Fox was beaten fairly easily by both Game 3 of Pacers-Heat on ESPN (6.8 million) and Game 3 of Blackhawks-Kings on NBC (2.4 million). Which, fine, those are playoff games up against three somewhat milquetoast, middle market, regular season baseball games.

Fact is, the package suffers among all comparable dates in the past. The games are down 19 percent from the similar week in 2013 (2.3M for a regional slate led by St. Louis/Los Angeles), and 30 percent from 2012 (2.6M for a regional slate led by Philadelphia/St. Louis).

Just to give you an idea of how weak this was, Sunday Night Baseball aired on ESPN2 this week against both an NBA and NHL conference final game. Despite only sending out one game to the country (St. Louis/Cincinnati) instead of three, the game drew 1.4 million viewers. Fox sort of copped to having a weaker slate this week than their cable network, FS1 (whose broadcast of Texas/Detroit received their A-team of Joe Buck, Harold Reynolds, Tom Verducci and Ken Rosenthal) but these numbers remain dismal, even when adding in a ton of other factors.

[Sports Media Watch]