They need to carry games with match-ups involving Koufax, Marichal and Gibson. That's what they used to do when I last watched, "Game of the Week" regularly. If that can't be arranged, the ratings will go up a little if they carry more games involving the Red Sox, Yankees and Mets. Sorry.
Back in the early 1990s a friend of mine in his mid 40s who fancied himself as a lifetime baseball addict became enraged when I told him that NBC was considering dropping the Game of the Week. He wanted to organize a letter writing campaign to the network to save it. He did not realize that his own local NBC affiliate had already dropped it a couple of years earlier in favor of Creature-Double-Feature, which they could make more money off because they owned all the commercial breaks.
To steal a line from John Kenneth Galbraith, the Game of the Week enjoys the obscurity it so richly deserves. Baseball is no longer the American past-time. I haven't seen a bunch of kids playing baseball in a neighborhood pick-up game since, well, the last time I was in such a game about 40 years ago. Anybody who wants to watch any game involving any team can watch that game on cable of some sort.
In football, the significance of regular season games is often expressed in the phrase, "there's no tomorrow", but in baseball, with its 162 game season, there are lots of tomorrows, so most regular season games will never be important enough to the general public to allocate 3 hours on a Saturday watch them.
