Swapping the Red Sox for the Blue Jays meant the Yankees went from record audiences in the Wild Card round to the lone declines on the opening weekend of the Division Series.
Saturday’s Dodgers-Phillies National League Division Series Game 1 averaged 4.7 million viewers across TBS and truTV, marking the largest audience on the opening weekend of the Division Series. The Dodgers’ win increased 46% from Royals-Yankees in the same TBS window last year (3.2M).
While Nielsen’s February expansion of out-of-home viewing and September rollout of “Big Data + Panel” mean that this year’s numbers have a built-in advantage over prior seasons, that would not fully account for such a large increase.
Earlier in the day, Cubs-Brewers Game 1 drew 2.2 million on TBS, up 16% from Tigers-Guardians on the network last year (1.9M).
As for the Yankees, their Game 1 against the Blue Jays averaged 4.0 million on FOX Saturday afternoon — down 18% from Mets-Phillies on the network in the same window last year (4.9M). Game 2 of the series averaged a sharply lower 2.18 million opposite NFL games on FS1, down 37% from last year’s Mets-Phillies game in the same window (3.45M).
Tigers-Mariners opened with 3.06 million on Saturday and then 3.53 million for Game 2 on Sunday, both on FS1 — up from last year’s comparable Padres-Dodgers games (2.88 and 3.44 million). (Keep in mind those single-digit gains are small enough that they could be fully explained by Nielsen’s methodological changes.)
It is no surprise that Yankees-Blue Jays posted the only declines of the weekend, as Canadian markets are not included in Nielsen’s U.S. viewership estimates. In Canada, Games 1 and 2 averaged 3.6 and 3.5 million, respectively, which would bring the viewership figures up to 7.5 and 5.7 million respectively. But as far as U.S. viewership is concerned, the Yankees-Blue Jays series is the only one not yet moving the needle.
That is a marked shift from the Wild Card Series, where the Yankees played their rival Red Sox and generated milestone audiences. That includes 7.4 million for last Thursday’s winner-take-all Game 3 (more specifically, a 3.7 rating and 7.44 million per Programming Insider), the most-watched Wild Card game under the best-of-three format that began in 2022 and most-watched Wild Card game overall since the previous winner-take-all matchup of the Yankees and Red Sox in 2021.
The Yankees’ win, which peaked with 8.38 million in the 8 PM ET quarter-hour, also delivered the largest audience of the MLB season (second-largest if one includes the All-Star Game). The three Red Sox-Yankees games rank as the top three, with Game 2 at 6.8 million (a 3.3 rating and 6.76 million viewers per Programming Insider) and Game 1 at 6.5 million (a 3.3 and 6.52M per PI).
The full Wild Card round averaged 4.63 million viewers across the ESPN networks, up 64% from last year. As noted previously, an increase of that size cannot be fully explained by Nielsen’s changes.
This year’s Wild Card round ranks as the most-watched in the best-of-three era. ESPN had not immediately disclosed viewership for any of the Wild Card games outside of the Yankees-Red Sox series.
