Game 7 a Home Run for Fox

The most-watched night of baseball in a decade capped a World Series that helped Fox cross the plate with its highest weekly average since broadcasting the 1999 Super Bowl, based on viewing estimates issued Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research.

Fox’s out-of-the-park ratings for coverage of the deciding Game 7 took a toll on the competition Sunday, resulting in the lowest-rated Emmy Awards since 1990, modest results for the NBC miniseries “Uprising” and an audience decline for the final episode of HBO’s World War II miniseries “Band of Brothers.”

For the most part, however, tune-in for the World Series didn’t heavily affect competing programs, instead recruiting millions of viewers--especially men--who don’t regularly watch the major networks in prime time. As a result, series such as “Friends,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “ER” held their own against Game 5 of the Series, though with Halloween as an added distraction NBC’s “The West Wing” and “Law & Order” did slide below the 20 million-viewer level for the first time this season versus baseball Wednesday.

The fifth-season premiere of Fox’s “Ally McBeal,” meanwhile, dropped more than 20% compared with last year’s opener, despite a solid lead-in from the sophomore-year kickoff of the network’s high school drama “Boston Public.”