Dodgers-Yankees beats Giants-Steelers on Monday night

At some point during the 1980s, football overtook baseball as America’s pastime. And football hasn’t looked back.

But baseball is still capable for scoring a periodic win, under the right circumstances. On Monday night, with Game 3 of the World Series against teams from the two biggest markets in the country against a Monday night game featuring the lackluster Giants, baseball drew a bigger audience than football.

Via FrontOfficeSports.com, the Dodgers-Yankees averaged 13.6 million viewers. But Giants-Steelers did only 13.4 million, despite an ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 multicast.

ESPN didn’t send out a press release on Monday with the audience numbers for the Week 8 game. That’s no surprise. The football viewership is low, especially with the game televised on a three-letter network in addition to the usual ESPN platforms.

But that’s OK. It’s Dodgers-Yankees in the World Series. Classic teams, massive markets. And, again, the Giants aren’t good enough to draw attention away from the local baseball team that is trying to win its first championship since 2009.

The fact that the football game came within 200,000 viewers of winning should be viewed as a positive. This is the World Series, not some run-of-the-mill regular-season game. While the NFL has grown accustomed to mopping the floor with MLB, Monday night’s ratings race was close enough for the NFL to declare yet another victory in the long-decided struggle between football and baseball for American sports supremacy.