Women’s Sports Sundays holding its own after replacing ‘Sunday Night Baseball’ on ESPN

ESPN replaced Sunday Night Baseball with Women’s Sports Sundays, and three weeks in, we are getting our first look at how the change is working for ESPN.

Through three weeks, WNBA games on Women’s Sports Sundays are averaging 1.04 million viewers. The latest edition of Women’s Sports Sundays was by far the series’ biggest viewership success, with 1.6 million people watching the Indiana Fever take on the Las Vegas Aces.

Fever-Aces was a strong audience for the WNBA on ESPN. Viewership for the game was up 53% from ESPN’s WNBA regular-season average last season and up 3% from last season’s Indiana Fever average on ESPN.

Sunday Night Baseball is averaging substantially more viewers, though that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering NBC airs the games over the air. On a Nielsen-only basis, Sunday Night Baseball averaged 2.71 million viewers over the same three weeks, rising to 3.1 million average viewers when including Adobe Analytics-measured streaming on Peacock.

But just because Sunday Night Baseball is winning in average viewers does not mean the move was bad for ESPN. NBC pays around $200 million a year for Sunday Night Baseball, while the WNBA’s entire media rights agreement sees six media companies combine to pay roughly $280 million annually.

ESPN also retained MLB rights, though it primarily moved the games to less favorable weeknight slots. The most-watched MLB game this season on ESPN averaged 1.6 million viewers, matching the Fever-Aces game for a New York Yankees-Kansas City Royals game on Memorial Day afternoon. That is significantly less than ESPN’s most-watched Sunday Night Baseball game last year—a Dodgers-Yankees matchup on June 1 that averaged 2.73 million viewers.

So while MLB certainly has the higher viewership ceiling, there is reason to believe Women’s Sports Sundays will be a success for ESPN when money is factored in. The biggest test for the series will come on July 26, when the featured matchup will be an NWSL game between Angel City FC and Racing Louisville FC. If the NWSL can draw numbers on par with the WNBA, that will be a great sign for the series.