NEW YORK - No surprise: St. Louis is a baseball town.
The Cardinals played a pivotal World Series game at home the same day that the struggling Rams hosted Monday Night Football. More than four times as many households in the metropolitan area were tuned in to baseball than football.
The Cardinals’ 3-1 loss in Game 5 to the Boston Red Sox was watched by an average of 14.4 million viewers nationally on Fox. The 8.9 rating was up 1 percent from the last Game 5, in 2011 between St. Louis and the Texas Rangers, the network said Tuesday.
The Rams’ 14-9 defeat of the Seattle Seahawks averaged 10.8 million viewers on ESPN. In St. Louis, the NFL game earned a combined 10.9 rating for ESPN and the simulcast on a local channel, representing the percentage of homes with televisions tuned in. That was lower than New Orleans (15.8), Portland, Ore. (12.9), Sacramento (12.5) and Las Vegas (11.5). The combined rating in the Seattle area was 36.4.
The baseball game drew a 43.8 rating in St. Louis and a 38.5 in Boston.
This marked the second time that the World Series and Monday Night Football were played in the same metropolitan area on the same night. The other was 1986 in New York, with the Mets hosting the Red Sox in Game 7 and the Giants playing the Redskins.
Sports, Pages 24 on 10/30/2013