The Mets’ 6-3 win over the Yankees on Tuesday night was not just a local draw in the New York market, but was also a national draw for TBS.
The Subway Series matchup, which aired on *three* networks in the New York market, drew 912,000 viewers on TBS across the country. That’s the network’s best regular season MLB viewership in 13 years (!), and the third-best for a regular season game since Turner became one of MLB’s national partners in 2008.
Via the Sports Business Journal, the top two also involve the Yankees – a 2009 Yankees-Indians game drew 1.1 million viewers (this was a Sunday afternoon game that featured the Yankees scoring six runs in the seventh and eighth innings to win, and came the day after the eventual World Champions lost 22-4 to a team that lost 97 games), and another Subway Series game, this time coming in 2008, that drew 975,000 viewers. The Mets won a rather pedestrian game 3-1, and neither team made the playoffs.
The Turner viewership could have been much higher had the game been an exclusive national broadcast. As mentioned, it aired on three networks in the New York market – TBS, YES, and SNY. Of the three, TBS brought up the rear with 182,000 viewers. YES led the pack with 484,000 viewers, followed closely by SNY with 457,000 viewers. That’s another 941,000 viewers that could have watched the game on TBS and pushed the viewership to a regular season record, but alas.
Throwing in the people that watched the game on TBS, that’s 1.123 million viewers watching that game in just one (which just happens to be the largest in the country) market.
I know we (well, specifically me) complain about the Yankees being on national TV a lot, but there’s no denying that the team is a draw when they’re playing well. Tuesday night is just the latest data point in that idea.
