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In New York, you can’t even beat “Jersey Shore” with a baseball bat.
Despite a red-hot battle with the Red Sox for first place and the playoffs looming, viewers in the New York City TV market overwhelmingly prefer fist-pumping to foul balls, according to Nielsen ratings.
A look at the latest available local ratings found that from Aug. 8 to Aug. 11, Yankees baseball averaged 506,000 viewers with two games on YES and one on WWOR/Ch. 9 against the Angels.
The same week, Snooki & Co. snared about 848,000 viewers for MTV.
“It’s insane,” AdWeek’s TV guru, Marc Berman, told The Post yesterday.
“The thing to remember about ‘Jersey Shore’ is that it’s not just a TV show, it’s a cultural phenomenon.
“It’s widely recognized across the country and does particularly well in metropolitan areas — especially in New York, the largest media market of them all.”
Based on last week’s national audience of 7.8 million viewers, Berman believes that the show’s New York City audience probably accounts for nearly 10 percent of its total viewers — a respectable figure for any TV program, but almost unthinkable for one that airs on cable.
“New York viewers love ‘Jersey Shore,’ ” Berman said. “It has become such an addiction. It’s sort of like watching a train wreck, and you can’t get enough of it.”
With only one exception — a tightly contested Yankees/Red Sox game in Boston on Aug. 7 — the reality show has handily beaten the ratings for the Bronx Bombers.
The fourth season of “Jersey Shore” premiered on Aug. 4, and its already sizable audience has been growing around 5 percent each week since.
It’s the second summer in a row that the “Jersey Shore” jugheads have clobbered the Yankees, drawing outsized network-TV-caliber ratings for MTV.
During the same week last year, the show drew 819,000 viewers in New York City, compared with an average local audience for Yankees games of 524,000 viewers.
For the latest season, the “Jersey Shore” cast headed to Florence, Italy, where they were met with fierce resistance from authorities who banned them from visiting some of the city’s cultural sites and said they could not be filmed drinking booze in public.
In the first episode of the season, pint-sized Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi admitted she had no idea where the country was — but was able to compare it to one of her favorite accessories.
“I have no idea where Italy is on the map,” she said. “But I do know what shape it is. It’s a boot!”