Because there’s nothing quite like playoff baseball
Every year, my family hosts a Super Bowl party and it’s kind of a big deal if I do say so myself. Pretty much everyone from our neighborhood comes and it turns into a sort of potluck. Everyone is super into it and knows all of the intricacies of the football game.
Well, my family also hosts a World Series party every year. Of course, the World Series, unlike the Super Bowl, consists of multiple games, so we tend to pick out one or two pretty important ones. It essentially takes the same form as the Super Bowl party, except for one thing: most people there don’t have the same grasp on baseball as they do on football.
Maybe this is just a thing in my neighborhood, but I doubt that’s the case. Super Bowl LX has 125.6 million viewers across its streaming platforms, according to Nielsen data. On the other hand, the combined average for all seven games of the 2025 World Series was 34 million, according to MLB. Obviously, there’s a pretty significant gap in viewership.
There are many reasons this could be. For one, football feels a lot more high stakes and that goes for the entire season; every game is crucial when you only play 16. Unless you’re a die-hard baseball fan like me, chances are you’re not tuning into every single 162 games because a lot of them may not matter in the long run. And boy, is it a long run.
A lot of people cite the pace of baseball games as a reason why they don’t watch. Baseball games used to be way upwards of three hours, which is definitely a lot, even for someone like me. But since implementing a pitch clock to speed up the game, baseball games are actually shorter than football games. So why is the pace of play such a big deal? I can’t lie, this is something that irks me. Football games are normally at least three hours long, but the actual game time is only an hour. Why can you sit through that, but refuse to watch baseball because it’s “too slow?”
Okay, let me stop my rant and get to the point. People, or at least the majority around me, don’t get into baseball as much as they do football. And no, I will never understand why, because Major League Baseball (MLB) has, dare I say, the greatest postseason of any modern sport.
Hear me out: the dramatics in baseball trump any other. I feel like you can cut the tension with a knife, the way pressure builds up in baseball. There’s nothing like a team coming back from a 2-0 deficit in a 5 game series (shout out Cleveland Guardians!), or an upset you never saw coming. Baseball is so unpredictable, especially in the postseason. You have genuinely zero idea who the hero of the team will be each game and, a lot of the time, it isn’t going to be the superstar. Let’s reference game 7 of the 2025 World Series: winner-take-all. Blue Jays are playing the Dodgers and they’re up one going into the ninth inning. They’re nine outs away from a victory when boom: the Dodgers tie it. And we head into extras, where the teams duke it out until the Dodgers finally plate a run across in the 11th inning. Cinema, right? And this year, there’s a major David vs Goliath dynamic between pretty much every team and the Dodgers. Someone’s gotta stop them.
This all goes to say that if you’re not paying attention to postseason baseball, now’s the time to start. The game may genuinely surprise you and I think you’ll enjoy it more than you’re probably expecting. Just give it a try, right? After all, this is the Wisconsin chapter and the Brewers have a real shot at a ring this year. So, in short, I have one thing to say: the World Series is, and has always been, my Super Bowl.
References
“51 million average viewers watched World Series Game Seven in U.S., Canada, and Japan combined.” MLB, 5 Nov. 2025, https://www.mlb.com/press-release/press-release-51-million-average-viewers-watched-world-series-game-seven-in-u-s-canada-and-japan-combined
“Nielsen: Super Bowl LX Final Viewership Rises to 125.6 Million Viewers with Verified Big Data.” Nielsen, Feb. 2026, https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2026/nielsen-super-bowl-lx-final-viewership-rises-to-125-6-million-viewers-with-verified-big-data/