WORLD SERIES 7TH GAME BLASTS OUT A RATINGS HOMER

On Monday night, That Game wowed viewers here and owned ‘em in Boston. However, the preferred sports event on TV in Washington was football. Diplomatic observers there attributed this to the Redskins.

As expected, though, NBC’s telecast of Game 7 of the World Series--its major opposition was ABC’s “Monday Night Football”--overwhelmingly won the preliminary overnight ratings, A.C. Nielsen Co. audience estimates showed Tuesday.

No national figures were available at press time. When they do arrive, said NBC research Vice President Gerald Jaffe, they may make the New York Mets’ series-winning 8-5 victory over the Boston Red Sox the most-watched baseball game ever.

The previous ratings champ, according to NBC, was the sixth and final game of the 1980 World Series, which was seen in an estimated 32 million homes.

The preliminary 12-city Nielsens for Monday’s seesaw World Series finale, according to NBC figures, showed that the game’s telecast averaged a 53% share of the audience, compared to 20% watching ABC’s football.

Overnight estimates provided by ABC showed that NBC’s World Series telecast averaged a 71% share of the viewing audience in New York, compared to 12% for ABC’s football joust.

Although there was no joy in Beantown when the last out was recorded, the World Series telecast on NBC drew the greatest local share of audience--79%--in Boston. But ABC’s competing football show was almost a no-show in ratings terms. It only averaged 5% of the area’s home-viewing audience.

“It wasn’t the Patriots,” sighed ABC research chief Marvin Mord, who nonetheless found a tiny bit of Nielsen joy in football-mad Washington.

There, ABC’s telecast of Monday’s 27-20 New York Giants victory over the Washington Redskins actually bested NBC’s show in the ratings. Football, he said, got an estimated 57% share of the viewing audience, compared to 37% tuned in for the baseball season’s last-game.

In Los Angeles, the World Series telecast on KNBC-TV drew 56% of the viewing audience in its time period, with ABC’s football show on KABC-TV getting 16% of the area’s home-screen patrons.

ABC’s Mord, a Yankees fan who said he’d been rooting for the Mets on a temporary basis, said that despite the high ratings for NBC’s Game 7 telecast, video schizophrenia undoubtedly was a fact of life for sports fans Monday night.

The schizophrenia took the form of constant channel-switching, from the World Series to the Giants-Redskins debate on ABC, and back again. The early Nielsen data, Mord said, shows “there was a tremendous amount of switching . . . it’s the most I’ve seen in a number of years.”

The ratings figures come only from homes.