This was posted Thursday, November 3, 2016 by Rodney Ho on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
While baseball usually takes a backseat to football, for one night baseball was the talk of the country thanks to the Chicago Cubs breaking a 108-year drought and winning the World Series in a crazy extra-inning game.
Nationally, an average of 40 million people watched the game on Fox, the best numbers for any World Series game since 1991, when the Minnesota Twins defeated the Atlanta Braves in game seven. (Relatively speaking, the Super Bowl typically exceeds 100 million.)
In metro Atlanta, during prime time, the game averaged 1.4 million viewers, peaking at 1.66 million close to midnight. About 1.2 million were still awake to catch the end at about 12:45 a.m.
In Chicago, more than 3 million people caught the game, the most watched baseball game in that market's history. About 71 percent of televisions on that night were tuned to the game. In Cleveland, about 700,000 people caught the game.
Obviously, ABC's 50th CMA Awards took a hit, drawing 12.6 million viewers, down 7 percent from a year ago. The 18-49 rating fell to an all-time low of a 2.9.
And just for fun, Budweiser worked with Harry Caray's family to create this homage to him, as if he were still alive to call the final out:
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