The 2022 World Series provided fans with a no-hitter, a home run onslaught, two large-market teams, and a heart-warming storyline with Houston’s Dusty Baker finally getting his managerial championship ring at age 73.

But it still didn’t make for must-see TV, based on the final series viewership numbers that came out Tuesday, compared to baseball’s past Fall Classics.

The Astros’ six-game series win over the Phillies averaged 11.78 million viewers on Fox, and 12.03 million combined viewers (Fox, Fox Deportes and streaming), the network said, which are fine numbers amid the harsh realities of the modern TV universe but still makes for one of the least-watched World Series on record.

In fact, it trails only 2020’s pandemic-affected Fox TV-only 9.94-million-viewer average (Dodgers over Rays). Last year’s six-game Braves win over the Astros averaged 11.94 million for the network, which has aired the World Series since 2000.

That’s bad, right?

Not necessarily from a strategic perspective, said one TV industry insider. In fact, it’s probably the so-called new normal for World Series viewership as baseball, like everything else on TV, tries to find equilibrium amid seismic changes in consumer viewing habits and technology.

“Show me something that’s setting an all-time (viewership) record somewhere,” said Patrick Crakes, a media analyst and former Fox Sports executive. “This is the range it’s at. The World Series was a top-10 prime-time show 50 years ago alongside ‘Mannix’ and it still is today. What else does that? The NFL and a couple other things.”

In other words, outside of pro and college football, everyone’s audience has shrunk as viewer options have increased.

“The number of options to spend time with continues to get infinitely larger,” Crakes said.

That context is important when analyzing the World Series, he added, noting that baseball expects to make about $11 billion this season.

“MLB has never made so much money, never reached so many people,” Crakes said. “Even with the regional sports network problems, it reaches more people than ever.”

It’s also important to remember that prior to 2020, audience tracker Nielsen didn’t measure out-of-home viewership (fans at sports bars, restaurants, viewing parties, etc.), so older totals are larger than what’s officially known.

Fox said Houston’s Game 6 clincher on Saturday night, which faced competition from college football and other sports, averaged 13 million total TV viewers (12.87 million on just Fox TV). That’s the lowest Game 6 average on record but still commanded one of the biggest audiences on U.S. television that night.

The best audience of the series was 13.01 million total viewers (12.76 million Fox-only) for Game 5 last Thursday — a night the World Series topped Amazon Prime Video’s Eagles-Texans “Thursday Night Football” stream. That head-to-head matchup occurred only because Game 3 on Halloween was delayed a day for weather.

Last year’s deciding Game 6 between the Braves and Astros averaged 14.14 million viewers, and two years ago — amid the first year of the pandemic that shortened the MLB regular season to 60-game team schedules — the Game 6 Dodgers’ clincher averaged 12.81 million.

The 2020 series was the least-watched on record, and television in general (and in particular, live sports) has slowly recovered audiences — a process made glacial by the ongoing cord-cutting trend that has tens of millions dropping cable. Streaming subscriptions haven’t offset cable losses in eyeballs and dollars.

When Houston won its first championship in 2017, the series went seven games (and the cheating scandal wasn’t yet uncovered). Game 6 that year averaged 22.22 million viewers while Game 7 jumped to 28.24 million.

If the 2022 World Series had gone a full seven games, the overall average would likely have been a bit bigger because Game 7s typically do up to 75 percent better than the average viewership of the first six games, according to information provided last year by Mike Mulvihill, a Fox Sports executive vice president and head of strategy and analytics.

Still, even with World Series viewership down significantly compared to the past (and baseball losing eyeballs and with a graying audience), Fox and MLB aren’t faced with immediate dire economic consequences. Why? Live “gem” sports events such as the World Series still dominate everything else on TV, and advertisers continue to pay a premium to reach the various demographics.

Fox pays MLB a reported $729 million annually through 2028 for its broadcast rights package that includes the World Series. The championship is a crown-jewel telecast, but such live sports deals are generally more about the day-to-day live game inventory that populates channels and streamers.

Advertisers spent $178 million on commercial airtime with Fox during the World Series, per data provided by advertising metrics data firm EDO Inc.

That’s up from last year’s $163 million and 2020’s $162 million (all six-game series). Pre-pandemic 2019 saw $302 million spent on ads during the seven-game Nationals-Astros series, while 2018’s five-game Red Sox win over the Dodgers was $239 million in ad spending, per EDO data.

The top spenders this year were Samsung Galaxy ($8.2 million for 22 spots) and Capital One and GEICO ($6.3 million each).

Game 5 on Nov. 3 saw the most brand spending of the six-game series at $33.46 million, according to EDO’s data.

“Advertisers still value it a great deal at the local and national level,” Crakes said.

Fox said this was the most-streamed World Series in network history with a 232,307 average minute audience for the six games. The network streams via its digital platforms and doesn’t have a standalone paid streaming service like Peacock or ESPN+.

While streaming is relatively new and doesn’t pay the bills like linear TV does for networks, looking at baseball’s historic television numbers is a crash course on how the broadcast industry has changed amid viewer options proliferating and the media landscape fragmenting.

MLB hasn’t seen a World Series game top 40 million viewers since the Cubs’ Game 7 clincher in 2016 — a series that involved two of the game’s most historically title-starved clubs. That game was baseball’s biggest audience since 50 million watched Game 7 of the 1991 Twins-Braves series, per Sports Media Watch’s database.

The most recent World Series game to average at least 30 million viewers was Game 7 of 2002’s Angels-Giants series.

What would it take to get back to those enormous audiences?

“Those numbers may be unreachable,” Crakes said, adding that it would take a seven-game series, without interruption, and probably would need to be a major market matchup between, say, the Cubs and Yankees to have any shot.

Barring a cataclysmic shift across the entire television industry, baseball nor any anything outside of the Super Bowl are likely to recover audience totals from decades ago. For the World Series, the peak average was 44.2 million viewers for the 1978 Yankees’ 4-2 series win over the Dodgers — the nation’s two largest TV markets. And the most-watched World Series game of all time was the Phillies’ title-clinching Game 6 victory in 1980 over the Royals, which averaged 54.86 million viewers.

Other interesting viewership notes, per Sports Media Watch, include 2022 being the first World Series without a Sunday night game since 1990, something that may have depressed the viewership total to some degree. Also, it was the first series with multiple Saturday night games, which is notable because that’s the worst night of the week for audience totals. That happened this year because of the rainout on Oct. 31 pushing Game 6 out of Friday and into Saturday.

(Photo of the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez: Harry How / Getty Images)