MLB thrilled with NBC’s first season of ‘Sunday Night Baseball’

NBC closed out its first season of Sunday Night Baseball on Sunday with Reds-Cubs, which drew 2.8 million viewers across NBC and Peacock. Across the full season, NBC and Peacock averaged 2.7 million viewers over 14 primetime broadcasts, the most-watched Sunday Night Baseball season since 2007, and that average holds even when factoring in NBC’s Opening Day primetime broadcast, which came on Thursday, March 26.

Five games — including three consecutive Sunday broadcasts in late July and early August — each topped 3 million viewers. Yankees-Red Sox on June 28 pulled 4.0 million viewers, while Dodgers-Yankees on July 19 drew 3.9 million, good enough for the two largest audiences in 15 years.

Compare that to ESPN’s final season with the package, which averaged 1.8 million viewers, itself a 21% jump over 2024 and the network’s strongest showing since 2013, before ESPN opted out last offseason.

People familiar with MLB’s thinking told Awful Announcing the early numbers have beaten what the league expected. They pointed to NBC’s production, including new touches like the “Inside the Pitch” format, and to the reach NBC gets from splitting games between a broadcast signal and Peacock’s app. NBC’s ability to promote the games across its broader portfolio was another factor, as was the flexibility of Peacock and NBCSN to reach cord-cutters and cord-nevers who may not watch traditional linear television.

All of that came while MLB kept ESPN as a partner and gained additional global reach and a younger audience through Netflix.

“We felt that if you could sacrifice revenue in exchange for reach, that we could do a lot to really showcase and elevate your property,” NBC Sports president Jon Miller told Puck’s John Ourand in April.

So far, MLB has gotten what it was promised.