As Major League Baseball approaches the halfway point of the 2024 season, a sudden glut of nationally televised games featuring the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers has given Fox an edge in the ratings race.
According to Nielsen live plus same-day data, the wealthy rivals have been all over the airwaves for the past two weeks, and their appearances in national TV windows have been putting up solid numbers. Fox on June 8 averaged a season-high 2.91 million viewers, with the second game of the Yanks-Dodgers set an 11-3 loss that still managed to achieve the highest attendance for a broadcast of the season MLB regular since September 2022.
Fox deliveries were up 14% from the analogous meeting between the Red Sox and Yankees a year ago (2.56 million). While Fox regionalizes its MLB coverage on Saturday nights, splitting a pair of games among its various affiliates, the Yankees-Dodgers game effectively reached 95% of the network’s stations, as only Ohio and parts of Florida received the Guardians alternate feed. -Marlins. A similar dynamic played out in last year’s Sox-Yankees matchup, which took place in about 87% of Fox markets.
The following night, ESPN closed out the three-game series with a broadcast that averaged 2.3 million viewers. This now remains as Sunday Night BaseballBoston’s biggest draw since Boston and New York opened the 2022 season on ESPN/ESPN2 in front of 2.48 million viewers.
Through its first 11 broadcasts, Fox’s MLB coverage is averaging 1.93 million viewers per game, a 7% increase compared to the same period a year ago. Currently, Fox can claim the four most-watched games of the season so far and six of the top 10, a list that includes the March 30 Yankees game in Houston (2.53 million viewers), a matchup between the Yankees and Sox on June 15 (2.4 million) and Thursday’s Giants-Cardinals game Birmingham’s Rickwood Field (2.35 million).
ESPN accounted for the remaining broadcasts in the top 10. Discounting a bonus matinee game on April 28, ESPN’s MLB windows are averaging 1.58 million viewers per game, a 5% increase over the period of the previous year.
Including the two overlapping games on Fox and ESPN, both the Yankees and Dodgers appeared on five of this season’s highest-rated broadcasts. The Giants, Cardinals, Reds and Mariners are tied on two dates each.
Including the lower-impact broadcasts on TBS and FS1, the league’s national windows are effectively flat at just under 880,000 viewers per game. Among the top-spending advertisers moving to national MLB games this season are Geico, Jersey Mike’s, Ace Hardware, AT&T, Lexus, Taco Bell, Apple, Wendy’s and Allstate. Insurance companies, automotive and fast-food restaurants lead the pack category by category.
While there is still plenty of baseball to play, the Yankees boast a 52-27 record, the best in MLB, while the Dodgers, at 48-31, are second only to the Phillies in the National League. The prospect of these two historic clubs meeting in the World Series has Fox buzzing; With a combined reach of 13.5 million television households, New York and Los Angeles represent 11% of the entire US audience.
If no one expects both clubs to put up the numbers they did in the 1970s, before cable TV, before the Internet and before everything, it’s worth taking a look at historical Nielsen data. The record-setting game of the 1978 World Series on NBC averaged 50.6 million viewers (and on a Tuesday night no less), making it the fourth-most-watched MLB game of all time. The six-game set averaged 44.3 million viewers, as 56% of all homes that had their TVs on at the time were tuned to NBC.
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