NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball drew its largest audience of the season last week, as Major League Baseball continues to post strong early-season viewership numbers.
The extra-innings San Francisco Giants-Chicago Cubs game averaged 2.34 million viewers on Sunday, June 7 (2.6 million when including Adobe Analytics), the largest Sunday Night Baseball audience of the season for NBC. Due to NBA commitments, Giants-Cubs was just the fourth Sunday Night Baseball game to air on NBC this season.
Overall, NBC is averaging 2.20 million Nielsen viewers across six telecasts this season. Excluding the network’s Opening Day doubleheader, the average falls slightly to 2.10 million.
Viewership rises to 2.5 million and 2.3 million, respectively, when including additional Peacock streaming tracked by Adobe Analytics.
For comparison, ESPN averaged 1.8 million viewers for its full 30-game slate last season. NBC has largely taken over ESPN’s former windows this season, including Sunday Night Baseball and Opening Day. During the same period last year, ESPN had aired 13 games and averaged 1.7 million viewers.
On Saturday, June 6, following the Belmont Stakes, Fox averaged 1.65 million viewers for the Cleveland Guardians-Texas Rangers. That window was originally supposed to feature Red Sox-Yankees, with the usual studio crew of Kevin Burkhardt, David Ortiz, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez on the game call, but the game was postponed due to rain.
That was the second-lowest audience of the season for Fox. The network is averaging 2.12 million viewers so far this season. Fox averaged 2.04 million viewers across its full-season slate last year. Of the 11 windows Fox has aired this season, eight have averaged more than 2 million viewers. Of the three exceptions, two came on days when rainouts forced Fox to shift from regionalized coverage to a single national game.
On ESPN, the network’s four-game slate has averaged 1.25 million viewers this season. The vast majority of ESPN’s 30-game schedule will take place during the summer. Yankees-Royals on Memorial Day afternoon remains ESPN’s largest audience so far this season, averaging 1.63 million viewers.
Comparisons to previous years may be skewed by Nielsen’s shift to the new Big Data + Panel methodology. Big Data has generally boosted viewership by around 15% for live sports events. However, older panel-only data is available for ESPN, and that shows a 1.17 million-viewer average. It’s only a four-game sample, but Big Data has resulted in just an 8% boost for ESPN’s MLB viewership.
It is still very early in the season, but Major League Baseball has seen strong viewership returns so far. With the season heating up during the summer, when MLB typically records its largest audiences, even stronger viewership numbers could be on the horizon.
About Manny Soloway
Manny Soloway is a Iowa based writer focusing on TV ratings. He is also the founder of the TV Media Blog substack.