The Josh Innes Show - WBC v. NBA Finals

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

I have allowed myself to be annoyed idiots on Twitter. What's new? My current issue is people who talk about TV ratings and have no clue about TV Ratings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When was the last time people just watch sports and the story wasn't about the ratings or which sport people care more about or which one is the number two sport to the NFL? Like when was the last time we as a people just watch sports and didn't give a shit about that type of stuff? And why do we care about that? Like why in 2026 is this an era where you can't just enjoy something? Like you have to explain to people why. you enjoy it and then you have to explain to people why what you enjoy is exponentially better than

something else. Like, look, I like Burger King better than I like McDonald's. I like the Whopper better than I like the Big Mac, right? And if you ask me, hey, which one do you prefer? I'd say, I like the Whopper. I'd like to go to Burger King and get a Whopper, right? What I don't do is say, well, you know, I like the Whopper. And let me tell you something, according to sales data across the country,

The Whopper now has less market share than McDonald's, which I find to be awful. And then some guy that likes McDonald's will come in and go, yeah, it's because McDonald's the number one burger in the country based on sale. And it's like, why can't we just enjoy shit? First off, let me play a couple commercials and we'll get into it. Why can't we just enjoy shit? Why can't we, like, say, you know what, I enjoyed the world baseball classic or I didn't, right? Like, I didn't get into it.

I was into it for like 10 seconds because it was fun to watch, you know, all these people on social media, shit on America. And then America beats the Dominican Republic. And it's kind of a fun story. And I'm kind of into it. But I watched barely any of the game and I don't care. Why is it that everything that happens cannot just be viewed in the context of I enjoyed that or I didn't enjoy that? Why do we have to view everything in the context of? Well, I enjoyed it.

And if you notice the ratings compared to, you know, to this other sport. This sport is clearly the number two sport in the country. Who gives a shit? First of all, you're all playing for second place behind the NFL, which you can't sniff the ass of the NFL if you're baseball, basketball, whatever. If you want some, you know, obvious reality, you're not even closed. But like, that's been the story I see with this World Baseball Classic. People can't just say, boy, the World Baseball Classic was great. Now you get a bunch of dipships who know nothing about television ratings, who know nothing about the industry at all, they want to run to social media and tell you, boy, look at those TV ratings.

And then the thing that I've been seeing the most of, and I'm fairly certain that this exists just to piss me off, is this thing I've been seen lately is, well, the ratings for the final game of the World Baseball Classic, the WBC final, the ratings were better than the average seven game rating for the NBA finals this year. Now, first off, you don't need a brain to know or you don't even need, actually, I remember take that back. You don't need to have a background in television to know that a one-off event compared to seven separate things that you're taking an average of is a preposterous comparison. It is preposterous.

There is no like, like, first, okay, a seven-game series is an indication. that not every game is make or break. Right? Now, a one-off final game of a series or a one-off game, like you're watching the NCAA tournament. Every game you are watching in the NCAA tournament is a championship game essentially. It is a winner takes all. It is a loser go home. If you lose, it's over.

There is a finality to those games. There is a finality to the World Baseball Classic final game. The finals, because it is a one-off deal. Comparing that to the average of seven games in the NBA finals is a preposterous endeavor. And it's misleading, and I think it's deliberately misleading by people. Here's how I know that ratings, when ratings data really doesn't matter, when it's a contrived fairy tale thing that's sent out by Clay Travis's website. I have a thought on that.

If a Clay Travis website puts out information to let you know that the NBA is dying, don't believe it. Because Clay Travis and everybody on his fucking website pander to right-wing people, and they are full of shit as it relates to basketball ratings or any ratings at all. They don't know a fucking thing. They know who they're pandering to. They know who their audience is. And they basically feed bullshit to that audience because they'll lop it up just like MSNBC will do for the other side of things. That's what these people do.

They find information. They spin it to where it fits their narrative. They spit it out to you. They know a bunch of idiots. They don't know any better. We'll just spit it back out and say, see, look at where we are. I saw one of Clay Travis's people put that out yesterday. And I'm like, you guys are full of fucking shit.

Like, I believe nothing you say. You are disingenuous people who are biased disingenuous people. But like anybody with a brain would know that the average of seven different things is a whole lot different than the result. of one thing. And apples to apples comparison between the WBC final and the NBA would be a game seven in the NBA finals. Oh, what happened in game seven of the NBA finals this year? It had like 18 million viewers. I think it was 16, 17, 18 million viewers compared to the 10 million viewers for the World Baseball Classic Final. At its peak, the NBA finals, Game 7 had almost 20 million people watching.

That is double the average. Look, you want to look at how ridiculous it is to compare averages? That's like saying, well, the NBA finals had 19 million people watching at the highest point, which means probably when the game was on the line, crunch time. If it's a close game, the last two minutes, whatever, right? Like that is crunch time in the game 20 million people were watching. That's like saying, well, we're going to compare the high point of viewership for the NBA finals game, but we're going to take the average of the full.

hours of the baseball game. Well, no. You'd look to see what the high point of the baseball game was and compare the two. Like, am I making sense, right? This is pretty easy to follow if you have a brain and you are not a biased pud face. It's pretty easy to follow. But of course, people want to lie and they want to spread misinformation or they're looking for affirmation for what their beliefs are. A lot of the people that I'm seeing are of this belief that baseball is super healthy and baseball is this huge thing now and this proves that baseball is the number two sport in the country and maybe it is. I'm not telling you it's not like I'm not sitting there trying to shit on baseball or trying to elevate anything or shit on anything else. I don't give a shit.

But just looking at it strictly from the idea that the world baseball classic prove that baseball is the number two sport and baseball and dominates the NBA. Okay, again, apples to apples, tell me what's going to happen when people are watching a random May baseball game between the and the Padres, or even the Dodgers and the Yankees, or the Dodgers and the Red Sox, or the Astros and the Rangers, no one's going to watch those games. That's the apples to apples comparison. The apples to apples isn't, hey, an international event that you know many of the people involved who are from different countries have a ton of pride in. It's in the middle of spring training. There's nothing really going on sports-wise right now. The Olympics had just happened, but no one's locked into regular season hockey

a regular season basketball. You've got the imaginations of people. Like, that's obviously going to have an audience. Like, give credit to the World Baseball Classic. It has a nice, sizable audience for something that's a relatively new event. Like, good for them. I'm not trying to shit on it. My problem is nobody can just accept that their thing had a nice moment.

Their thing has to be the biggest thing that has ever happened. And everything is a sign that the world is changing and that they are super powerful. and it's bullshit. It is possible for the World Baseball Classic to have a nice moment, and then you can look at all the reasons why it had a nice moment, and that nice moment is not some sort of indicator that baseball is on its way to bean back to where it was. It's not.

That's my issue, is people, and we talk about this all the time, and I'm aware that we talk about this all the time, people make me hate things. I don't hate the World Baseball Classic. I hate people like Justin Verlander's brother who keeps spitting out this dumb fucking narrative about how the average of the NBA finals ratings is less than the World Baseball Classic Final. Of course it is. You have a final game with everything on the line that, by the way, involves America.

You want that number to be a lot lower? I guarantee that number wouldn't be that way if America wasn't in it. But nobody takes into consideration factors. Factors matter. Like the elements matter. The pieces matter. You'll go back to the World Series last year where people were blowing baseball. Like, can you believe these numbers that they're putting up in the World Series?

Yes, because you've got one of the, you got Otani, this gigantic Japanese star, tons of people from Japan are watching. You've got the entire country of Canada. And it's a seven game series. And game seven goes to extra innings. Of course the numbers are great. Oh, but what about the NBA? It crushes the NBA. Okay, well, let's look at the factors for the NBA.

The NBA finals last year. Do you guys remember who played? Indianapolis and Oklahoma City. Indianapolis and Oklahoma City, if I had to guess, are probably the two of the bottom five markets in the NBA. Like Memphis, I think, is the smallest. You have New Orleans and Memphis, which I would guess are smaller. New Orleans is probably similar to Oklahoma City. But New Orleans, Memphis, and that's it.

After that, you'd start getting to Indianapolis, Sacramento, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, city, those types of towns. So you want me to buy that that's a true indicator, an apples to apples indicator, that a final event which pits country against country, one of those countries happens to be the United States of America, you want to tell me that's an apples to apples comparison? It's not. It's bogus. And everybody knows it's bogus.

But nobody wants to look at how things come about or look at the factors. that lead to what they lead to or look at the nuance in it because what do we talk about on this podcast all the time? Nobody understands nuance. And even if they do understand it, they deliberately ignore the nuance. And that's what we end up with here is people that just keep regurgitating and they know that people are stupid and they know that people. And why would we expect the average person to know what ratings mean?

You know, the number of people who whenever they talk about me or someone wants to take a shot at me, they'll look at ratings on the six plus. You can Google 6 plus radio ratings. That's like the only step that's really public. And you can Google like if you Googled right now and you'd say, let's Google Detroit Radio ratings. Okay, you Google that. You click on RadioOnline.com and you can look at the radio rating. Now, granted, our ratings do actually suck across the board.

It's not just, you know, in this era or on this demo. But people would just look at that and go, wow, W.L.L. LZ is in like 18th place. Yeah, but nobody even cares in our industry about what your six plus rating are. They care about men 2554, persons 2554, men 1849, persons 1849. It varies by certain stations. Some stations care more about the women 1849. Like there's a bunch of factors.

It's easy if you're a moron to just sit here and go, look at that. You're getting your ass kicked in this rating. Yeah, because that's the only one they make public because that's the only ratings that no one actually gives a shit about. They don't matter. but people don't get that. I don't expect you to.

That's not your job. But if you're going to go to social media and go to Facebook, go to Twitter and whatever, and yell at the mountaintops like you know what you're talking about, well, then at least fucking know what you're talking about. But these people don't do that. They just yell at the mountain top that they know what they're talking about and don't have a fucking clue. So then what you end up with is these Ben Verlanders and these other people who, like, why does everything have to be basketball against?

baseball. Like, I understand that you're both fighting for the crumbs left over by the NFL, which dominates the world and college football, which dominates America too. But why has everything got to be, like, why does it have to be baseball versus basketball? And you can't like, like back in my day, back when I was a wee boy, you could like basketball and baseball. And that was cool. If you lived in Houston, you can go, boy, can't wait for baseball season because the Astros are going to play. And boy, it's basketball season. Let's go watch the Rockets. It wasn't some bullshit war between sports and the fan bases of these sports. Which goes back to the original point, when did this change and why did it change?

Like, how did we get to this point where you can't just be like, hey, that was really cool that the World Baseball Classic did well and that people liked it? It has to become, well, if you look at the ratings data, the data says that Game 7 or the World Baseball Classic Final was actually far more popular than the NBA Finals. because the NBA finals only averaged to 8 million people blah blah blah blah blah like you don't know what the fuck you're talking about you're just an ignorant dipshit that regurgitates shit that some guy who validates all of your beliefs said therefore you believe it's true