Entertainment

Will anyone watch the World Series this year?

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The formula is as old as baseball on TV: no Yankees, no ratings.

So the guessing game has started: who’s going to watch a World Series between the Texas Rangers and the San Francisco Giants?

The audience for the Fall Classic, once one of the biggest TV events of the year, has been on a steady slide since the Yankees-Mets Subway Series dropped below 20 million viewers for the first time.

Things perked up for a while — especially for the 9/11-postponed, Yankees-Diamondbacks Series in 2001 and the Red Sox curse-breaking Series three years later.

But the bottom came in 2008 — Game 3 of the Phillies-Tampa Bay Rays Series — when the ratings fell below 10 million viewers.

Tvbythenumbers.com, an industry Web site specializing in TV ratings analysis, yesterday posted an online poll asking readers to guess the average viewership.

The site’s experts then ventured the first, rather optimistic prediction: “A five series to average 16 million viewers, about the same as the 2006 series.”

It goes without saying that a Series that goes seven games generates the most excitement. And, on average, the longer the Series goes, the higher the ratings.

“We’re due for a seven-game series,” says Michael Mulvihill, vice president of programming and research for Fox.

It’s been seven years since the Series went the distance, he says — “and there’s never been an era of the World Series where we went eight straight years without a Game 7.”

The absence of a team like the Yankees or the Red Sox “is going to make an impact, no doubt about it,” he says.

One more problem looms, though.

The Giants have home field advantage this year by virtue of the National League winning the All-Star game.

That means as many as four games will start at 5 p.m. local time (8 p.m. NYT).

At that hour, almost no one on the West Coast will be home from work in time to watch the first pitch.