Yankees-A’s Strike Out Against NFL

Baseball threw the best it had at “Monday Night Football,” which in turn lofted two winless teams at baseball.

Football still won.

Monday night’s football game between the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins on ABC earned a national television rating of 9.9 with a 16% share of the audience. The fifth and deciding divisional playoff game between the New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics on Fox got an 8.4/13.

In Los Angeles, the football game won, 10.1/15 to 8.3/14.

“It’s a tribute to the popularity of the NFL that we were able to beat such an important baseball game,” ABC spokesman Mark Mandell said.

Fox spokesman Dan Bell said his network was not looking at the ratings victory for football as a negative.

“We are encouraged by the 8.4,” Bell said. “Overall, the prime-time divisional playoff games on Fox averaged a 6.4/11, which is 25% higher than the 5.1/9 we got last year. And the 8.4 is 27% higher than the 6.6/11 we got for Game 5 of the Yankees and A’s last year.”

The baseball game obviously did better than the football game in New York and the Bay Area. In New York, the baseball earned a 23.1/33, while football got a 3.3/5. In the Bay Area, baseball got a 17.6/27 compared to a 10.2/15 for football.

In Dallas, football got a 31.4/44, baseball a 6.5/9. In Washington, football won, 26.3/42 to 8.1/12.

A rating represents the percentage of all homes with TVs tuned in to a particular program. A share is the percentage of homes where television is being watched.