Baseball ratings are high in L.A.

The Angels’ season may have ended Monday night when they lost to the Boston Red Sox in their division series, but television’s biggest loser was “Monday Night Football.”

In the Los Angeles market, Angels-Red Sox on TBS got a 9.3 rating, competitive with ABC’s popular “Dancing With the Stars” (13.8) and well ahead of the 5.8 rating on ESPN for the Monday night game between the New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings.

In Boston, the Red Sox are the drawing card. The baseball game got a 24.7 rating, “Dancing With the Stars” an 11.0 and “Monday Night Football” a 2.5, meaning Patriots Coach Bill Belichick may have been one of the few watching.

Nationally, baseball’s division series on TBS have not fared as well. The 15 games in the first round averaged a 3.3 cable rating and 4.3 million viewers. That’s a 25% drop from a year ago when the averages were 4.4 and 5.7 million for 13 games.

Part of the problem is the absence of the New York Yankees, an attractive draw across the country.

It also didn’t help that the second night of baseball went up against the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, watched by nearly 70 million. On Wednesday, TBS had 5.3 million viewers for three games. A day later against the debates, the viewership for the three baseball games dropped to four million.

-- Steve Springer