To say that Cubs and Indians fans are a hungry for a World Series championship is like saying Henry Rowengartner was a bit of a historical outlier.

A Fall Classic of epic proportions is upon us with two long-suffering franchises looking to lay waste to long-standing curses, whether real or imagined.

“It really isn’t a baseball story or even a sports story,” said Fox analyst Alex Rodriguez on a conference call with reporters Monday. “This is an American story. I have so many friends from different walks of life, from different parts of the country and the world who say, ‘I haven’t watched the World Series in over a decade, but I’m gonna watch this one.‘”

Think this one will be good for ratings? With NFL TV ratings down double-digits and a dream World Series matchup ready to go, baseball pundits and executives alike are bullish that a classic Series could move the game back into the national consciousness like it hasn’t been in years.

When the Cubs appeared in the 1945 World Series, it would still be two years until the Fall Classic was broadcast live on television. Add it to the long list of how the world has changed since the Cubbies last claimed the National League pennant.

Like last year, the Cubs have been good for business this postseason. Chicago’s Game 6 pennant-clinching victory on Oct. 22 drew a cool 9.7 million viewers on Fox Sports 1, the network’s most-watched program ever and the highest NLCS game in six years. The game drew a whopping 25.8 rating/46 share in the Windy City, numbers that are likely to rise even higher tonight when the Series begins.

Overall, the Cubs/Dodgers NLCS averaged close to seven million viewers across six games. That figure was actually a dip from last year’s Mets/Cubs series (7.9 million viewers) but remained well ahead of the 4.5 million that tuned in to the 2014 Giants/Cardinals NLCS.

Indians/Blue Jays ALCS numbers were down 13 percent from last year, averaging just 3.3 million viewers on TBS for the five game series. While those numbers are technically an all-time low, they are somewhat misleading in that they don’t take into account Canadian viewership, which were strong north of the border.

This year, Joe Buck will be joined in the Fox booth by 1995 World Series champion John Smoltz, who served as lead analyst for the regular season and NLCS. Smoltz also called the 2015 World Series for baseball’s international feed. The duo will be joined by Ken Rosenthal, providing field reporting for his 11th Fall Classic.

Fox’s pre- and post-game show studio team is back, with Kevin Burkhardt joined by his colorful trio of analysts, Pete Rose, Frank Thomas and Rodriguez. The group has received unexpected plaudits from pundits for their chemistry and rollicking discussions. Earlier this week, an off-the-cuff hitting discussion morphed into a six-and-a-half minute clinic with three of the greatest hitters ever. It has been watched by nearly 11 million people on Facebook.

Rodriguez has been something of a revelation on TV—-calm, at ease, and (gulp) even likable.

“You’ve never been around a guy that prepares more than Alex does,” Rose said on the press call. “He does his homework, he knows the game, he understands the players. He’s into the deal. He’s into what we’re doing and it shows.”

Thomas concurs. “This is the first time the media has seen the other side of him,” said the longtime White Sox slugger. “To just have fun. To be one of the guys.”

Fox Sports executives say they will make the Chicago and Cleveland fan bases a major part of their coverage. It’s probably a smart gambit by network brass, since both snake-bitten franchises are defined just as much by their fan bases as the men on the field. Executive producer John Entz says his production team is rolling out nine super motion cameras, the most it’s ever used, and hoping to have enhanced audio from the field.

So we’ve established this is big. But what is a possible viewership number for this World Series? Last year’s Royals/Mets contest averaged 14.7 million viewers, an uptick of close to a million from 2014, but still just a semblance of the numbers the World Series garnered in its pre-cable heyday,

It’s perhaps most instructive to look back not to last year but to the 2004 World Series, the last time a team with a franchise as star-crossed as the Cubs broke a curse that spanned back to the early 20th century. The ‘04 Red Sox/Cardinals series averaged close to 25.4 million viewers, easily the highest total rating, share and viewership of this millennium.

Could Cubs/Indians make a run at those numbers? For baseball, just like everything else this crazy year, anything seems possible.

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