As Major League Baseball approaches the midway point of the 2024 season, a sudden abundance of nationally televised games featuring the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers has given Fox a leg up in the ratings race.
According to Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, the well-heeled rivals have been all over the airwaves in the past two weeks, and their appearances in the 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 blowout which still managed to notch the highest turnout for a regular-season MLB broadcast since September 2022.
Fox’s deliveries were up 14% versus the analogous Red Sox-Yankees meeting one year ago (2.56 million). While Fox regionalizes its Saturday night MLB coverage, splitting a pair of games across its various affiliates, the Yankees-Dodgers game effectively reached 95% of the network’s stations, as only Ohio and parts of Florida were served up the alternate Guardians-Marlins feed. A similar dynamic played out for last year’s Sox-Yankees showdown, which was carried in around 87% of Fox’s markets.
The following night, ESPN wrapped the three-game series with a telecast that averaged 2.3 million viewers. That now stands as Sunday Night Baseball’s top 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, good for a 7% lift compared to the year-ago period. Fox currently can lay claim to the four most-watched games of the season thus far, and six of the top 10, a roster that includes the Yankees’ March 30 outing in Houston (2.53 million viewers), a Yankees-Sox squabble on June 15 (2.4 million) and Thursday’s Giants-Cardinals game from Birmingham’s Rickwood Field (2.35 million).
ESPN was responsible for the remaining telecasts in the top 10. Discounting a bonus matinee game on April 28, ESPN’s MLB windows are averaging 1.58 million viewers per game, good for a 5% lift versus the year-ago period.
Including the two overlapping games on Fox and ESPN, both the Yankees and Dodgers have appeared in five of this season’s top-rated telecasts. The Giants, Cardinals, Reds and Mariners are tied at two dates apiece.
Including the lower-impact telecasts 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 who’ve flocked to national MLB games this season are Geico, Jersey Mike’s, Ace Hardware, AT&T, Lexus, Taco Bell, Apple, Wendy’s and Allstate. Insurance, automotive and fast-food restaurants are leading the pack on a category-by-category basis.
While there’s still a lot of baseball left to play, the Yankees own an MLB-best 52-27 record, while the Dodgers at 48-31 trail only the Phillies in the National League. The prospect of these two storied clubs meeting up in the World Series has Fox all aflutter; with a combined reach of 13.5 million TV households, New York and Los Angeles account for 11% of the entire U.S. audience.
If nobody expects the two clubs to put up the sort of numbers they did in the pre-cable, pre-Internet, pre-everything 1970s, the historical Nielsen data is worth a look-see. The deciding game of the record-smashing 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 in to NBC.
