Baseball’s dominant ratings draw in the regular season, the Yankees opened their postseason run with a four-year viewership high.
Tuesday’s Guardians-Yankees MLB American League Division Series Game 1 averaged a 3.05 rating and 5.35 million viewers on TBS, marking the largest audience for an LDS Game 1 since Yankees-Red Sox on TBS four years ago (5.57M). Overall, it ranks fourth among Division Series openers in the past decade, behind Yankees-Red Sox in ’18, Giants-Cubs on FS1 in 2016 (5.71M) and Cubs-Cardinals on TBS in 2015 (5.38M).
The Yankees’ win, which doubled last year’s comparable Red Sox-Rays Game 1 on FS1 (~2.6M), delivered easily the largest audience of the postseason so far — cruising past the previous high of 3.96 million for Padres-Mets Game 3 in the Wild Card round.
It dominated the overlapping Padres-Dodgers Game 1 on FS1, which averaged 2.43 million — down from Dodgers-Giants in the same window on TBS last year (~4.0M).
Guardians-Yankees swept the night in the key young adult demographics, dominating the rest of television with a 1.3 rating in 18-49, a 1.0 in 18-34 and a 1.7 in 25-54. Padres-Dodgers ranked second for the night in 18-34 (0.7) and 18-49 (0.55) and placed fourth in 25-54 (0.83) behind the Yankee game, “FBI” on CBS (1.02) and NBC’s “The Voice” (0.97).
Earlier Tuesday, the Astros’ comeback, Game 1 walk-off win over the Mariners scored 2.48 million on TBS — up comfortably from Braves-Brewers in the same window last year (~2.1M). Figures for the TBS games do not include the Spanish-language simulcasts on MLB Network.
Figures were not immediately available for the first game of the day, Phillies-Braves Game 1 on the FOX broadcast network.
(Nielsen estimates from Programming Insider 10.12, ShowBuzz Daily 10.12)
