It’s already been an exciting Major League Baseball season.
And that excitement is clearly translating into the business and advertising side as well. Earlier this summer, Variety reported that ads for the MLB All-Star Game, which took place in July, sold out over a month in advance.
On Monday night during Game 3 of the World Series, when the Los Angeles Dodgers won against the Toronto Blue Jays—which gave L.A. a 2-1 series lead and featured another significant performance from Shohei Ohtani—the game went to 18 innings and lasted six hours and 39 minutes.
So what happens to ads when a game has extra innings?
When a large tentpole tournament or a championship game like the Super Bowl goes into overtime, it often turns into a bidding war between advertisers.
But baseball is a unique animal and in a league of its own. It’s different compared with the NFL’s Super Bowl, given the complexity of the sport’s structure and due to unplanned breaks and pitcher changes, which have to be accounted for.
According to a source familiar with the matter, Monday night’s game had so many breaks that Fox, which is broadcasting the series, went through its entire national inventory by the 13th inning, running out of spots because it went on for so long. From there, the network ran several promos from that point on until the 18th inning.
While a normal game usually runs around 76 commercials, the source said that around 108 spots ran on Monday night.
What typically happens from a ratings perspective is that the network can cut off the game and split it into two sets of viewership numbers: one where it starts at the beginning of the game at around 5:15 p.m. ET and goes until 12:30 a.m. ET.
And then there’s the entire game from start to finish: Monday night’s Game 3 ended around 3 a.m. ET.
The longer that the game goes on, viewers will start to go to bed and the ratings will typically drop—so it doesn’t necessarily help to continue running new spots at that point in the game.
“They ran into an anomaly,” the source told Fast Company.
However, something similar happened seven years ago in 2018, when the Dodgers and Red Sox endured an 18-inning matchup in Game 3 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium, and the network had to split viewership into two games, according to our source.
While the viewership numbers from Monday night’s 18-inning Game 3 have yet to be released, Fox reported that it averaged 13.3 million viewers from Game 1 on Friday, down 13% from last year, while 11.6 million watched Game 2 on Saturday, which is down 16%.
At the same time, with the Blue Jays in the series, TV ratings are generally up when combined with Canada’s viewership.
Fox declined to share specific numbers around commercials in this year’s World Series tournament, but in Variety’s report from July, a source told the publication at the time that Fox had been “seeking between $750,000 and $800,000 for a 30-second commercial in the All-Star Game.”