A winner-take-all matchup between baseball’s most heated rivals delivered multiple viewership highs.
Tuesday’s Yankees-Red Sox American League Wild Card game averaged a 4.5 rating and 7.69 million viewers across ESPN and ESPN2, marking the second-largest Nielsen-reported audience ever for the Wild Card round. The 2015 Cubs-Pirates NL Wild Card averaged 8.30 million on TBS.
Boston’s win also delivered the largest Nielsen-reported MLB audience on the ESPN family of networks since 1998. (The Nielsen-reported distinction is important because two previous Wild Card games on ESPN averaged larger audiences when including additional streaming viewership not tracked by Nielsen.)* Keep in mind that excludes the Home Run Derby.
Ratings soared 61% and viewership 69% from the last standalone AL Wild Card Game in 2019 (Rays-A’s: 2.8, 4.54M). No game of last year’s expanded Wild Card series averaged more than 2.6 million.
Yankees-Red Sox outdrew all four games of the 2018 ALDS between the same two teams, a fairly forgettable four-game affair that aired on TBS. The top game of that series averaged 7.15 million.
As one would undoubtedly expect, viewership was nowhere close to the previous winner-take-all games between the Yankees and Red Sox — their back-to-back Game 7s in the 2003 and 2004 ALCS averaged a whopping 27.49 and 31.46 million, respectively, on FOX.
For the season, Yankees-Red Sox trails only the MLB All-Star Game as the most-watched baseball broadcast of the year, ranking not far behind the Midsummer Classic (8.24M).
Notably, Tuesday’s game outdrew all-but-one game of last year’s MLB Postseason, trailing only the Braves-Dodgers NLCS Game 7 that aired on both FOX and FS1 and benefited from an NFL lead-in (9.66M). It also outdrew every NBA playoff game prior to the NBA Finals, including the Bucks-Nets Game 7 in the second round (6.91M).
It was television’s most-watched program and its top rated in adults 18-49 (2.0) and 18-34 (1.5). The top non-sports program in each demo was not particularly close — NBC’s “The Voice” ranked second in 18-49 (0.9) and ABC’s “Bachelor in Paradise” ranked second in 18-34 (0.7).
Locally, Boston turned in a 19.8 rating and New York an 11.2.
* The 2016 Giants-Mets and 2015 Astros-Yankees Wild Card games, both of which aired on ESPN, averaged 7.71 and 7.73 million viewers respectively when including additional streaming data not tracked by Nielsen. The Nielsen reported audience for these games was 7.4 and 7.6 million. ESPN no longer adds in streaming viewership tracked by other measurement companies.
[Nielsen estimates from Programming Insider 10.6, ShowBuzz Daily 10.6]
