Long-running Game 5 held TV viewers’ attention

Sunday slugfest bests NFL; Darvish declines apology.

Americans are binge-watching the World Series, sitting through 5 hours, 17 minutes of baseball Sunday night into Monday morning as if it were a new season of “Orange is the New Black.”

Baseball is too long, too late and apparently too hard to resist, even if some — especially the next generation of would-be fans — can’t stick it out.

That the Astros’ 10-inning, 13-12 Game 5 victory over the Dodgers ended at 12:38 a.m. Central time (10:38 p.m. in Los Angeles, 1:38 a.m. East Coast) should worry some within Major League Baseball on some level. But it’s rare to hear many complaints about too much of a good thing, and it was quite a show.

MLB no doubt is elated Game 5, despite its length, sustained an average 12.8 overnight household rating in the nation’s metered markets. Although 16.3 percent lower than the Cubs-Indians Game 5 last year, it’s the second highest-rated Game 5 in the overnights of the 10 played since 2003. Plus, for a second successive year in headto-head competition, Fox’s World Series coverage beat NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” — the Steelers’ 20-15 victory over the Lions.

Even if the game had ended in nine innings, it still would have clocked in at 10 minutes shy of five hours. Hard to believe the same two teams, with the same two starting pitchers, wrapped up Game 1 in 2 hours, 28 minutes.

Fox said Sunday’s game averaged 19.6 million on its three outlets, drawing 18,940,000 on the main Fox Network, 496,000 on Fox Deportes and 172,000 on the digital stream Fox Sports Go.

The game drew a 32.8 rating and 52 share in the Los Angeles, the highest for the market since the Anaheim Angels beat San Francisco in Game 7 of the 2002 World Series. The Astros’ win drew a 32.9/53 in Houston. The rating is the percentage of television households watching a broadcast and the share is the percentage tuned in among those households with televisions on at the time.

No apology: Yuli Gurriel wanted to apologize in person. Yu Darvish said it wasn’t necessary.

Major League Baseball suspended the Astros’ Gurriel last Saturday, a day after he made a racist gesture toward the Dodgers’ Darvish, a Japanese right-hander, during Game 3. Darvish said before Game 6 on Tuesday that Gurriel contacted the Dodgers about meeting with him to apologize, but Darvish declined because he said he wasn’t that mad at Gurriel.

The pitcher says he found out about Gurriel pulling on the corners of his eyes after homering off Darvish when a Dodgers employee informed him in the dugout last Friday. Darvish says initially he didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, but realized it was after the game. Gurriel also used a derogatory Spanish term in reference to Darvish.

Darvish said he gets why Commissioner Rob Manfred didn’t impose Gurriel’s suspension until the start of next season, but Darvish said he can’t really judge whether five games is too much or too little.