The cornfield-themed and ad-revenue-record-setting Field of Dreams game between the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox Thursday (capped off with Tim Anderson’s walk-off home run) worked out very well for Fox. As per their release Friday afternoon, they wound up with the best regular-season MLB viewership (counting both Fox and Fox Deportes) since 2005:
The #MLBatFieldofDreams was the most-watched regular season baseball game in 16 years, with 5,903,000 viewers across FOX and FOX Deportes ⚾️
Chicago and New York ranked as the top two markets, and it was the most-streamed regular season baseball game in FOX Sports history ? pic.twitter.com/EfzfrUUik2
— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) August 13, 2021
That’s certainly an impressive draw. Yes, there’s some context there, especially considering that this is a pretty dead period on the sports calendar. The biggest competition Fox faced came from the NFL preseason (on NFL Network for the Washington Football Team-New England Patriots game, and local networks for the Pittsburgh Steelers-Philadelphia Eagles game) and the CFL (on ESPN+ for the B.C. Lions-Calgary Stampeders game).
But, with that said, this was still a considerable pull, and that feeds into the discussions of MLB continuing with a “Field of Dreams” game in future years. We’ll see what happens there. But this was definitely a win compared to regular MLB on Fox coverage.
[Fox Sports Press Pass; photo from Jeffrey Becker/USA Today Sports]
