A deciding Game 5 between baseball’s best teams delivered strong numbers Thursday night.
Thursday’s Dodgers-Giants National League Division Series Game 5 averaged 6.50 million viewers on TBS, marking the largest LDS audience since Game 4 of the Red Sox-Yankees ALDS in 2018 (7.15M) and the largest NLDS audience since Cubs-Nationals Game 5 in 2017 (7.02M).
Los Angeles’ one-run win soared 75% from last year’s lone LDS Game 5, Yankees-Rays (3.72M), and increased 11% from the last NLDS Game 5 — Nationals-Dodgers in 2019 (5.86M).
The five-game Dodgers-Giants series delivered the five largest audiences of the LDS, with each game up double-digits from the equivalent window in 2019. The Dodgers have played in six of the top seven games thus far, the lone exception being the Yankees-Red Sox AL Wild Card (7.69M).
As one would expect, Game 5 was no match for the competing Buccaneers-Eagles Thursday Night Football game on FOX and NFL Network (14.42M).
Dodgers-Giants was the third postseason game thus far to crack the six million viewer mark, tying 2017 and 2018 as the most at this point of the postseason since 2015 (five). At the same point of last year’s postseason, not a single game had cracked even the four million mark (it took until Game 4 of the LCS before any game cracked five million).
[Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 10.15]
