Happy endings only happen in the movies.

As Wilford Brimley, Glenn Close and an urchin in a newsboy’s cap look on and the music begins to swell, Roy Hobbs sends that last pitch screaming into the rightfield lights—which triggers a chain reaction of cinematic explosions. Cue Robert Redford’s majestically lit slow-mo trot. Everybody goes home smiling.

Setting aside the fact that the ball would’ve had to come off the barrel with an exit velocity of something like 160 mph if it were to plow into the light bank at the very highest point of its trajectory, the 1984 adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural does a great disservice by burying the novel’s megabummer ending. In the book, Roy whiffs (“He struck out with a roar”), and then he goes and beats up some guys. One heavy gets punched so hard that his glass eye pops out and rolls into a mousehole. The other guy gets his wig knocked off and has an accident in his pants. On the next and very last page, Roy weeps in front of a kid peddling newspapers, all of which are stuffed with stories about how he’s nothing but a bum and a cheat.

That’s more like it.

As the credits roll on the Yankees’ 2025 campaign, it would appear that fans in the country’s largest media market are stuck in the printed version of The Natural. Sure, Aaron Judge made with some long-awaited October heroics during Game 3 of New York’s Divisional Series loss to Toronto, and while the big fella’s three-run dinger made the Stadium erupt, those theatrics were merely a reprieve from the inevitable. In the real world, failure is endemic—even when you’re sitting on a $300.2 million payroll. 

Now that the Blue Jays have advanced to the ALCS, Bombers fans aren’t the only ones who are about to get slapped in the mouth by the Way Things Are. Coupled with the Mets’ inability to so much as secure a Wild Card berth, the Yankees’ early exit will effectively erase a big swath of the New York DMA from the Nielsen rolls. According to the ratings service’s new market universe estimates for the 2025-26 broadcast season, Gotham in the last year has added 347,320 TV households, an upgrade that on its own is vaster than the entire No. 99 DMA (South Bend, TV pop. 344,060).

All told, the New York area, which includes the northern half of New Jersey, all of Long Island and a clutch of upstate counties that are a two-hour drive from Yankee Stadium, is home to 7.84 million TV households, or 6.12% of the national base. And while the absence of a hometown rooting interest obviously won’t translate into a total baseball blackout hereabouts, only someone who’s been clobbered over the head by Wonderboy might expect to see the World Series ratings reach the heights of last year. (The final game of the Yankees-Dodgers set averaged 18.6 million viewers, marking the biggest Game 5 delivery in seven years.)

The good news is, the Dodgers are still very much in the mix. Los Angeles didn’t add anywhere near as many new TV homes as its East Coast rival, but the new headcount (5.9 million) gives Angelenos bragging rights to a 4.61% share of the national base. That’ll come in handy if the Dodgers make a return trip to the Fall Classic, assuming they’re able to hold off the Cubs and/or Brewers. Encompassing 3.75 million TV homes, Chicago’s another vital market to have in play, even if the 2016 Cubs put the Curse of the Billy Goat to rest after 71 years of futility. (The Cubbies’ Game 7 victory over Cleveland scared up 40 million Fox viewers, making it the most-watched World Series broadcast since 1991.)

Also still in the thick of things is a trio of long-suffering clubs in Milwaukee, Detroit and Seattle. The last (and only) time the Brew Crew punched their ticket to the World Series was in 1982, when Three’s Company was somehow still the biggest show on Tuesday nights; 21.2% of all TVs in use that season were trained on Jack Tripper and his bug-eyed landlord, Mr. Furley. Meanwhile, the Tigers haven’t won a title since Kirk Gibson buried the Padres in ’84—a good four years before his real-life Roy Hobbs moment with the Dodgers. (Baseball fans are nothing if not rank sentimentalists, and the prospect of bearing witness to a generational underdog lifting the pointy hardware may be too good for even disaffected Yankees boosters to miss out on.

And then there are the Mariners, who are homing in on 50 years without having earned a trip to the Series. The No. 13 market boasts 2.15 million TV homes and one of the most loyal fan bases in the nation.

Which leaves Toronto as the only team that most advertisers would just as soon hit the links well before the season draws to a close at month’s end. For obvious reasons, the Jays have no home base here in the U.S., and while their most recent World Series peaked at 29.1 million viewers, that was 32 years ago. Still, if the Canadian club is representing the AL in two weeks’ time, that’s not to say that the north-of-the-border numbers will be inadmissible in MLB’s calculus. Nearly 10% of the country tuned in to Game 3, as the Jays have the Great White North buzzing like it’s 1993 all over again. (As it happens, Toronto’s last World Series title coincided with the Montreal Canadiens’ most recent Stanley Cup Final triumph. A Canadian team has yet to hoist Lord Stanley’s beer stein since then.)

As much as representative market size is a key factor in drawing a crowd for every U.S. sporting event other than the Super Bowl, duration is also impossible to overlook. A Game 7 may be hard to come by—the last one was in 2019, when the Nationals beat the Astros in front of 23 million viewers—but a series that gets stretched to its limits will always draw a crowd.

The desire to see things play out is familiar to anyone who’s tracked primetime entertainment ratings; while Everybody Loves Raymond was arguably well past its sell-by date by the time the show wrapped its nine-season run on CBS in 2015, the series finale drew a staggering 33 million viewers—a TV turnout that was a good 83% higher than that season’s opener (17.9 million). Per Nielsen, 76.3 million people tuned in for the conclusion of the Seinfeld saga, and while the episode marked a rare creative L for Larry and Jerry, the audience for that overcooked two-parter was more than twice as big as the show’s full-season average.

However things shake out on the DMA and duration front, market size can only take an advertiser so far. Despite the sheer scope of New York’s TV-using population, the natives are restless … and it’s even raising eyebrows in NFL circles. The Jets recently saw their local deliveries plummet to an ignoble 4.5 rating, which translates to a meager 350,530 Gang Green households tuning in to WBCS-2. YES Network regularly serves up more in-market homes with a regular-season Yankees game. The Giants are faring somewhat better than their stadium mates, but with a combined record of 1-9, New York isn’t putting its best foot forward in 2025.

For all that, national NFL ratings are cruising along at a 15-year high. There’s more than one way to skin a cat—honestly, there can’t be more than two if you really think about it—but market size isn’t the be-all and end-all when the time is ripe to whip up a big live sports audience.

Robert Redford died last month at the ripe old age of 89, and while he [presumably] won’t be watching the World Series, the lesson of Roy Hobbs lives on. Strip away all that Hollywood foofaraw, and everybody strikes out in the end. But give Fox a seven-game series with a good storyline and the right set of superstars, and it should still be able to shoot out all the lights when it comes time to close out the story of another long and memorable season of baseball.