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For sad.

Last year, the Phillies led Major League Baseball in local TV ratings with a 9.1 rating (an average of 9.1% of households with TVs watching) on CSN.

Not so good this year: The Phillies’ local ratings went down 39% to 5.61 (as of last week), dropping them from first to seventh in Major League Baseball, according to the Sports Business Journal. This season's ratings are also a decline from the 8.3 local rating the Phillies got in 2010 and the 7.14 local rating they got in 2009.

[As an anecdotal aside, I received at least two press releases from CSN last year touting Phillies ratings. All was quiet on that front this season.]

None of this, of course, is a surprise. Rather, it’s just another sad reminder that days have ended (though it doesn’t mean that some slight tweaks won’t kick off a new run next season). 

The Phils still led Major League Baseball in attendance, both in average (44,021) and total (3,565,718), so it’s not like people fled in droves. Then again, many of those tickets were sold before the season started, meaning that the team’s struggles had little impact on attendance figures… this year. The real measure will come next season. TV ratings are more of a real-time metric than ticket sales, and as you just read, the ratings weren’t good this season. The impact this season’s struggles have on ticket sales will present itself sometime in February and in Clearwater.

That countdown begins today. It’s roughly only 130 days until pitchers and catchers report.