Does the Home Run Derby affect the RAW rating?

Someone asked me whether there was any relationship between the annual Monday Night Home Run Derby and Monday Night Raw's rating. It's an interesting question so I did some digging.

While I don't have viewership numbers going back to 1996, I do have Monday Night Raw Ratings (courtesy of Gerweck.net). I pulled the Home Run Derby dates from Baseball-Reference.

I looked at Raw Ratings from November 1995 to July 7 2014 and ran a regression which included five variables:

• Was it the day immediately after a PPV?
• Was it a 3-hour RAW?
• What was the trailing 4-week average Raw Rating?
• What was the trailing 8-week average Raw Rating?
• Was it the night of the Home Run Derby?

Obviously, there's a host of other variables that I could have included. (Was it a holiday like Memorial Day or Christmas? Was the Raw taped? Was there other significant television competition such as a major sporting event or other huge network TV show? And so forth.)

(Graph has a projected Rating for the July 14, 2014 Raw Rating.)

As you can see, visually it's unclear whether the HR Derby does or does not affect the Raw rating.

date	rating	Day after PPV?	HR Derby?	3 hours?	4-week trailing	8-week trailing
7/8/1996	2.50	No	Yes	No	2.58	2.59
7/7/1997	2.50	Yes, IYH:  Canadian Stampede	Yes	No	2.38	2.63
7/6/1998	4.00	No	Yes	No	4.58	4.56
7/12/1999	5.97	No	Yes	No	6.43	6.76
7/10/2000	6.00	No	Yes	No	6.08	6.23
7/9/2001	4.70	No	Yes	No	4.40	4.35
7/8/2002	3.70	No	Yes	No	3.85	3.85
7/14/2003	3.80	No	Yes	No	3.95	3.81
7/12/2004	3.70	Yes,Vengeance	Yes	No	3.78	3.65
7/11/2005	3.60	No	Yes	No	3.73	3.79
7/10/2006	3.90	No	Yes	No	4.05	3.96
7/9/2007	3.37	No	Yes	No	3.88	3.73
7/14/2008	3.20	No	Yes	No	3.50	3.30
7/13/2009	3.50	No	Yes	No	3.85	3.65
7/12/2010	3.33	No	Yes	No	3.39	3.28
7/11/2011	2.90	No	Yes	No	3.13	3.18
7/9/2012	3.17	No	Yes	No	3.29	3.13
7/15/2013	3.05	Yes, MITB 2013	Yes	Yes	3.01	2.93
7/14/2014	???	No	Yes	Yes	2.90	2.88

The average rating from 1996 to 2013 was 3.72.  That is <0.16> below the 4-week trailing average and <0.14> below the 8-week trailing average.

Out of the 18 years I looked at, 12 times (67%) the rating trailed both the 4-week and 8-week averages. 4 times (22%), the rating trailed at least one of the two averages.  Only twice was the rating above the 4-week and 8-week trailing averages: 2013 (when it came one day after a PPV) and 2001 which was a monumental episode of Raw from Atlanta where ECW allied with WCW in the main event in a swerve!

When we look at the Ratings of for the Home Run Derby, we see that the years where the HR Derby rating was 5.0 or higher (1998, 1999, 2002, 2008, 2009), WWE's Raw Rating was anywhere from -0.15 (2002) to -0.62 (1999) below their trending average.  There's a significantly lower impact when the HR Derby rating is lower than 4.5 (average of only 0.08 off the normal trending average).  

Returning to my regression...

The equation suggestions:

RAW Rating = 0.10 intercept + 36% x (8-week trailing average) + 60% x (4-week trailing average) + 0.14 (bump for being day after PPV?) -0.03 (if it's a 3-hour RAW) -0.15 (if it's against the Homerun Derby).

If we drop the 3-hours? variable and replace the HR_DERBY binary (1=yes, 0=no) with the actual rating for the event, the new equation has a slightly lower p-value for HR_derby (0.076 versus 0.104 originally) and the equation adjusts to 0.084+0.153xPPV+60.4%x4-week+36.5%x8-week-0.361xHR_DERBY_RATING.  In this example a 5.0 rating would knock about 0.18 off the expected Raw Rating and 3.5 rating would knock about 0.13 off the expected Raw Rating.

In conclusion, it does certainly appear that the Raw Rating during the week of the Home Run Derby is being affected by the popularity of the baseball contest. It's probably only going to knock about 5% off the rating, but it's certainly not insignificant.

-Chris Harrington

@mookieghana