Columnist Ron Kantowski: Send whining about ratings down the tube

Friday, July 16, 2004 | 9:23 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

The next time you see a published story or news brief stating that television ratings for this or that major sporting event were the lowest ever, do yourself a favor and ignore it.

It terms of useful information, these reports don't exactly fall into the "In Case of Emergency Break Glass" category.

This week, it's Major League Baseball's turn to take Mr. Nielsen to task, after overnight ratings confirmed the American League's 9-4 win against the National League Tuesday night was the least-watched All-Star Game of all time.

If TV sets still had rabbit ears on top instead of cable boxes and satellite dishes that can pull in soccer games from Indonesia, baseball might have something to worry about. But the fact that only 9,504,000 households (which translates to an 8.8 in the overnights) were tuned into this year's game probably won't even make the post-it note on Bud Selig's refrigerator in this day and age.

What's amazing is that the wire services still move yearly charts of TV ratings for events such as the All-Star Game that don't list the pre-cable/satellite years with an asterisk.

During the 1960s and '70s, the All-Star Game ratings were higher than Bill "Spaceman" Lee at a Grateful Dead concert, peaking with a 28.5 in 1970. But other than "Mannix" and "Marcus Welby, M.D." reruns and "I Love Lucy" on the independent channel, what did it have to compete with?

Even in Chicago, where I grew up, we received only six channels, and two were UHF stations. One, Channel 26, was broadcast in Spanish, and unless you were a bullfighting aficionado, didn't offer sports programming. The other, Channel 32, showed White Sox games. So it didn't offer much sports programming, either.

Contrast that to today, where cable and satellite TV offer entire tiers of sports programming. And movie channels up the wazoo. And entire networks devoted to comedy, home improvement, cartoons, cooking, music, computers, soap operas, science, history, weather, Playboy bunnies and fuses (which I assume is what the FUSE network is about). Not to mention three channels devoted to obnoxious guys trying to make time with vapid women wearing way-too-small tank tops and the Total Loser Who Becomes Famous By Pushing His Wife Off a Cliff Network.

Remember when the closest thing we had to reality TV was "Bowling for Dollars?" That was low definition TV at its finest.

But I have to admit that I'm as guilty as the next guy when it comes to dwindling ratings for TV sports. Since I made the HD plunge a couple of years ago and bought a TV that is roughly as wide as the front straightaway at Talladega, the last book I picked up was TV Guide. Given the choice between watching Roger Clemens toss cantaloupes up to home plate or watching flowers bloom in the Amazon in living colors that would make the NBC peacock blush, mark me down for the latter.

Does that make me any less of a baseball fan? Maybe. But in that I can pick and choose from about 48,242 televised games between now and the time the wild card playoff teams (egad!) are decided, it's not like I won't have a chance to get reacquainted with the game.

Besides, if baseball really felt it had a problem with its All-Star ratings, all it has to do is draw straws to determine who gets to groove a batting practice fastball to one of its aging stars.

It's not like that hasn't happened before.