Tigers have seen MLB’s biggest RSN viewership increase in 2025

Things are going well for the Detroit Tigers this season. And the people in Detroit are taking notice.

As the second half of the 2025 MLB season gets underway on Friday, the Tigers have the best record. And as John Ourand detailed in his newsletter, the Tigers RSN has also seen a bigger increase in viewership this year than any other team in the league.

“As you know, the Tigers have the best record in baseball this season, and their TV ratings are through the roof,” Ourand wrote. “Through the first week of July, local viewership more than doubled the team’s performance on FanDuel Sports Network Detroit last season.”

Other notable increases cited include the New York Mets on SNY (41%), Chicago Cubs on Marquee (30%), Los Angeles Dodgers on Spectrum SportsNet (29%), Boston Red Sox on NESN (26%) and the Kansas City Royals on FanDuel Sports Network Kansas City (26%).

Those all make sense. The Tigers not only have MLB’s best record but also had their best season in several seasons in 2024. New York is coming off of an NLCS trip and signed Juan Soto in the offseason. The Cubs and Red Sox are both big-market coming off a few mediocre seasons — but are both in much better shape this season. The Dodgers, of course, are also a big market contender and coming off a World Series win. Kansas City is the only team on that list that is coming out of the All-Star Break with a losing record. But a trip to the postseason in 2024 certainly gave the Royals and their fans a lot of optimism coming into the year.

On the other end of the spectrum are the Athletics and Chicago White Sox, who (per Ourand) have seen drops of 44% and 50%, respectively. And those are just as logical.

The Athletics, who left their 56-year-home of Oakland following the 2024 season, are at the beginning of a three-year run in Sacramento before a planned move to Vegas in 2028. While they’re playing in Sacramento (West Sacramento, to be specific), the A’s have opted against including the city in their team name, which really exacerbates the nomadic feeling around the team.

Chicago, meanwhile, lost 121 games last season to establish a modern era MLB record. On top of that, they switched RSNs from NBC Sports Chicago to the new Chicago Sports Network, which had negotiations with cable providers, such as Comcast, that were not solved until the MLB season was well underway. And while the White Sox aren’t as bad on the field in 2025 as they were in 2024, their All-Star break record still has them on track to lose well over 100 games.

The newsletter also detailed that overall, MLB’s ratings are on a similar track this season.

“All told, MLB local games are flat with last season,” Ourand wrote. “And in 16 of the 26 MLB markets, live games beat everything else on linear TV, including shows on both over-the-air stations and cable channels.”