The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry helped YES Network to a multi-year high. Elsewhere, the Cardinals-Pirates LLWS special delivered double-digit gains on Sunday Night Baseball, and Top Rank Boxing did better in its latest outing on ESPN.
Yankees-Red Sox Big For YES
- Friday’s Yankees-Red Sox Major League Baseball game earned a 5.78 rating and 571,000 viewers on YES Network in New York City, trailing only Derek Jeter‘s final game at Yankee Stadium in 2014 as the highest rated and most-watched game on the RSN in five years. The YES Network audience exceeded the national broadcast on MLB Network, which was blacked out in N.Y. and had 342,000 viewers. The teams’ Saturday meeting had 321,000 on MLBN and their Sunday matchup on TBS scored 609,000 (+53%).
Cards-Pirates LLWS Game Up Double-Digits
- The special Cardinals-Pirates game at the Little League World Series earned a 1.1 rating and 1.8 million viewers on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, up 22% in ratings and 31% in viewership from Mets-Giants last year (0.9, 1.4M) but down a tick and 6% respectively from Giants-Pirates in 2015 (1.2, 1.9M). In other action, Rangers-Angels scored 331,000 on ESPN Tuesday (-39%) and Yankees-Mets had 855,000 on the network last Wednesday (+104%). Sandwiched in between on Fox Sports 1, Dodgers-Tigers drew 348,000 on Saturday (+9%).
Bigger Numbers For ESPN’s Top Rank Boxing
- ESPN’s latest Top Rank Boxing card, headlined by the Terence Crawford–Julius Indongo bout, earned 0.6 rating and 965,000 viewers Saturday night — up a tick in ratings and a third in viewership from the network’s previous card two weeks earlier (0.5, 728K). Viewership increased slightly from Crawford’s previous bout on HBO in May (961K).
[Numbers via YES Network, ShowBuzz Daily 8.22, Boxing Scene 8.22]
