Welcome back to “The Needle,” a ratings-focused column on Sports Media Watch that will break down the numbers, attempt to put some context behind the data, and discuss broader trends in measurement and television viewing.
Last week’s record-setting World Baseball Classic was just the latest viewership hit for Major League Baseball, coming off of the two most-watched World Series since 2017. And as is often the case any time any league anywhere has a ratings success, much of the conversation concerned … the NBA.
Indeed, the league that always seems to be the point of comparison for any and all properties was again the talk of social media, or at least one segment of it, during the WBC.
It might go without saying that comparisons between an every-few-years international competition and domestic league play are the product of extreme, bad-faith cherrypicking. But coming amidst a broad resurgence in viewership for domestic Major League Baseball games, is there a legitimate argument that baseball’s recent upswing has taken it past the NBA?
Finding a fair point of comparison
To begin with, it is worth determining which parameters are the best and fairest measures of popularity. The NBA and MLB approach local and national television very differently. Major League Baseball is a regional sport with twice as many regular season games as the NBA. That helps when adding up local RSN viewership and hurts when averaging out a national audience.
Taking a simple average of national television viewership across all NBA and MLB games from the regular season through the playoffs — including the NBA Finals and World Series — would show the NBA coming out ahead by such a massive margin that it would give an unrealistic impression of the leagues’ respective popularity.
One might wonder how that could be. But understand that the overwhelming majority of Major League games on national television — more than 80 percent — are non-exclusive regular season games on cable that are often subject to local blackout in at least one of the participating markets.
Between FS1, TBS and MLB Network, the majority of baseball games on television generate the kind of six-figure audiences that would be considered below par (even indicative of terminal decline, depending on the social media feed) for an NBA regular season game. MLB Network in particular airs hundreds of those games per season, all of them subject to blackout in both participating markets, many of them on weekday afternoons.
The majority of NBA games on national television are also non-exclusive, but a smaller percentage of about 70 percent. And while all games on NBA TV are also subject to blackout in both home markets (even the playoff games it carried through last season), the NBA does not have a policy of blacking out its other national TV games unless a team exceeds its maximum allotment of appearances on a given network.
NBA TV also carries far fewer games than MLB Network, and that was the case even before it had its inventory reduced in the new NBA media rights deal.
By comparison to MLB, the majority of NBA games on national television co-exist with regional sports networks in the home markets, or are exclusive in at least one of the home markets. The result is that the NBA consistently generates seven-figure audiences, while baseball only does so for its fully exclusive games. During the 2024-25 regular season, 142 NBA games averaged at least one million viewers out of 172 total across ABC, ESPN and TNT (83%). During the 2025 Major League season, only 53 telecasts hit that mark out of 125 on FOX, ESPN, FS1 and TBS (42%).
Removing both MLB Network and NBA TV from the average, the NBA averages 2.7 million viewers across all telecasts (from the regular season through the NBA Finals) compared to 2.6 million for MLB (from the regular season through the World Series), about what one would expect for the two leagues that have always been in closest proximity of the “Big Four.”
(Note that all of the 2024-25 NBA figures referenced in this article are the old Nielsen ‘panel-only’ metrics, and all of the MLB averages are the new Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” methodology, meaning that the margin is almost certainly higher than three percent. In addition, the first four months of the 2024-25 season took place before Nielsen expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets in the lower 48 states.)
Baseball essentially sacrifices its national audience, and national rights fees, to protect its local broadcasts. And until the collapse of the RSN industry, there was good reason. Those local broadcasts are dominant. Dominant enough to make MLB a bigger draw than the NBA overall? That is harder to discern.
Though one can hardly question whether MLB is a considerably stronger draw than the NBA on local television, there is no good way to combine local and national viewership. The only way to adequately determine local RSN viewing is by adding up all of the games in a given day, and doing so unsurprisingly benefits a league like MLB with twice as many games as its competitors.
MLB averaged about six more games per day during its 2025 regular season (~13) as the NBA did in 2024-25 (~7.5). (Taking out national TV games — save for those on MLB Network and NBA TV that were fully blacked out in the home markets — the margin is around MLB 12, NBA 6.) In MLB, there were 126 days in which 15 games were scheduled (meaning the entire league was in action), compared to four in the NBA.
Combining the daily RSN and national MLB audiences into a single figure thus gives MLB an advantage that — as with the NBA earlier — provides an unrealistic portrait of the leagues’ respective popularity. Ultimately, there are simply too many differences between the NBA and MLB on local and national television to create an across-the-board comparison that is fair to both leagues.
So what about the postseason? Similar, though not exact formats. Similar, though not exact television coverage. Surely that is closer to apples to apples?
Not entirely. Last season was the last of the old NBA media rights deal, and thus the last in which local RSNs carried any postseason coverage. The first round of the NBA Playoffs was almost entirely non-exclusive, with games on ESPN and TNT co-existing with RSNs and games on NBA TV fully blacked out. There were a total of 37 non-exclusive first round playoff games, including four that were fully blacked out locally, accounting for more than half of early round inventory (66 total) and nearly half of all postseason inventory (84 games).
By comparison, all MLB Postseason games are fully exclusive. (Even the occasional MLB Network playoff games, which have been discontinued, were fully exclusive).
With that in mind, there is not much one can discern from the overall postseason average — MLB coming out ahead 6.3 million to 4.7 million — or the average for the early rounds (4.3 million for MLB and 3.9 million for the NBA).
Surely, the late rounds of the postseason can provide some greater insight. The NBA conference finals averaged 6.3 million viewers, outdrawing the MLB League Championship Series at 5.3 million, despite one of the LCS going seven games. But how much can one really compare an all-primetime conference finals to an LCS that includes afternoon games, including some during the workweek?
Which really leaves only one point of differentiation, the NBA Finals vs. the World Series.
Ohtani vs. OKC
In 2007, the Red Sox-Rockies World Series — a matchup so uninteresting that Alex Rodriguez’ free agency decision overshadowed the clincher — outdrew LeBron James’ first NBA Finals by 84 percent (17.1 to 9.3M). It was the ninth-straight season the World Series came out ahead.
Few would have thought so at the time, but that was to be the final year of a dominant run for the Fall Classic over its NBA counterpart. From 2008-19, the NBA Finals outdrew the World Series in all-but-two years, an unprecedented stretch for an event that had previously come out ahead only three times total — 1993, 1997 and 1998, all involving Michael Jordan’s Bulls. Those wins became a nearly annual occurrence throughout the 2010s.
But the pendulum would seem to have swung back in the 2020s, with the Fall Classic outdrawing the NBA Finals in four of six years.
Yes, the World Series was impacted less by COVID than the NBA Finals — which aired out-of-season twice — and has benefited from the presence of a dynastic team in the nation’s largest market. The NBA on the other hand has had unprecedented parity, culminating in last year’s matchup of Oklahoma City and Indiana. The result is that the Fall Classic has topped the NBA Finals in four of the past six years (three of which featured the Dodgers and two of which saw the NBA played out-of-season).
It has also had the bigger-market matchup in each of those four years, including in 2020 when both L.A. teams made their respective Finals. Despite Toronto contributing exactly zero U.S. TV homes, last year’s Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series (5.9 million TV homes in Los Angeles alone) nearly tripled the combined market size of the Thunder-Pacers NBA Finals (2.0 million combined across Indianapolis and Oklahoma City).
As one might say, ‘them’s the breaks.’ The NBA benefited from James making eight-straight finals (four against Stephen Curry) at the same time that MLB had a random number generator picking its World Series matchups. Sometimes that gave MLB an incredible bounty (Cubs-Indians). Sometimes that gave MLB Royals-Giants. Parity giveth and taketh away.
None of this is particularly surprising or even hard to figure. More than a decade ago in 2012, this writer observed the following in another comparison of NBA and MLB viewership:
The NBA’s lead is predicated on circumstances that could easily change within the next few years. Should the Yankees or Red Sox begin winning championships again — or at least make the World Series — baseball’s fortunes will almost certainly rise. As for the NBA, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James have played in every NBA Finals for the past six seasons. One imagines that stretch of good luck will eventually come to an end.
The only thing not easily foreseeable 13 years ago was that it would be the Dodgers, not the Red Sox (or even the Yankees), keying baseball’s resurgence.
Baseball has always had a higher ceiling than the NBA, and that has been clearest when it gets its highest-profile teams into the Fall Classic. It should be no surprise that of the six total World Series to outdraw the NBA Finals in the past 18 seasons, five involved the Yankees (2009), Cubs (2016) or Dodgers (2020, 2024 and 2025). (The exception was Braves-Astros in 2021, the year when the NBA Finals matchup was Bucks-Suns in July.) If the future is Ohtani in October and Oklahoma City in June, that advantage figures to persist.
So has baseball surpassed the NBA on television? It is not necessarily clear that anything has actually changed. The NBA is a stronger national TV sport and baseball is a stronger regional sport — owing to no small extent to the very different structures and approaches of both leagues — and whichever league gets the highest-profile matchup tends to win out in the championship series. The only difference between now and ten years ago is that the league with the big market dynasty is baseball and the league with small market parity is the NBA.
The fact that this is a conversation is owed to two things. One is the extraordinary, shameless bad faith in which NBA ratings are discussed, owing to culture war topics that have nothing to do with sports. The other is the very real momentum baseball has had since Ohtani arrived in Los Angeles — not Anaheim, but Los Angeles — in 2023.
In 2023, the NBA had its most-watched season of the past five years, averaging 2.1 million viewers across 363 regular season and playoff telecasts. MLB finished that year with its least-watched World Series ever — a dull five-game affair between the Rangers and Diamondbacks averaged even fewer viewers than the COVID bubble edition in 2020. While the NBA had a similarly lackluster NBA Finals between the Heat and Nuggets, that was a healthier draw that followed one of the league’s most memorable postseasons, featuring upsets, comebacks and big market teams making deep runs.
Since 2023, baseball viewership has risen more than a third across all telecasts. NBA viewership dipped 5 percent over the same period (from 2022-23 to 2024-25), though the current season is officially up 30 percent and trending at a seven-year high (all comparisons to past years are skewed due to Nielsen methodological changes).
If it has felt like people are watching baseball more and more, and watching the NBA less, there has been some truth to that (though the NBA’s decline has been greatly exaggerated). Does that mean MLB is hot and the NBA is not? Perhaps, as one writer suggested not too long ago, it means that MLB is hot and the NBA is cool.
Where might all of this be headed?
NBA viewership is up double-digits so far this season — 30 percent overall and 13 percent with NBA TV excluded — aided by its new media rights deal and corresponding broadcast TV tonnage (which includes the addition of a second measurement company, Adobe Analytics, for NBC games), plus the change to “Big Data + Panel.”
Officially, this season is the most-watched in seven years, though the Nielsen changes skew comparisons to past years. (“Big Data + Panel” was being tracked for two years before becoming official Nielsen currency last September, but it is official Nielsen policy to compare present-day “Big Data” numbers to the old panel-only equivalents.)
There is good reason to believe those increases will continue into the playoffs, and perhaps even intensify. Instead of the least-watched playoff games airing on Nielsen-rated NBA TV, those will air on Peacock this year — which is not rated and will not factor into the viewership averages. That alone could give this year’s playoffs a significant leg up. Plus, the NBA this year will join MLB in having all playoff games carried exclusively on national TV.
That is on top of an increase in exclusive regular season inventory, with the league on pace to finish its current regular season with 86 fully-exclusive windows, 22 more than last year.
MLB will also benefit from many of those same advantages as it begins a new relationship with NBC. MLB “Sunday Night Baseball” will air exclusively on Peacock during the most competitive portions of the season, opposite the NBA and NHL playoffs in the spring and the NFL in the fall. With those games excluded from the average, and with all the other games airing on broadcast television, this season of “Sunday Night Baseball” should be one of the most-watched in the history of the series.
And with ESPN keeping the same number of exclusive national windows as in past seasons — just on different nights — MLB will join the NBA in having more fully-exclusive regular season inventory on Nielsen-rated television. Between 24 games on FOX, 30 on ESPN and at least 20 on NBC, there should be at least 74 this season.
With the MLB season and NBA Playoffs yet to begin, it remains to be seen whether these changes will cancel each other out or change the calculus in one direction or the other.
But what is all of this really about?
All of this analysis is really beside the point. In the context of the NBA, the ‘strange new respect’ for baseball viewership on social media has little to do with that league’s rising fortunes.
With the possible exception of the NFL in 2017 (and for very similar reasons), no league has had more written about its television ratings with less honesty than the NBA. Its television ratings are a referendum not on its popularity, but on social stances from more than half a decade ago — and a desire to see the league and its players pay the price for those stances. Realistically, the ‘go broke’ part of the equation has never come close to reality; quite the contrary. But as they say, Twitter is not real life.
So whenever there is any opportunity — whenever any league or property has a moment in the sun — the comparison to the NBA follows.
At a certain point, one wonders when the gap between the pronunciations of doom and all the indicators of health (rights fees, franchise values, and the league’s own ratings milestones) will become too much for these comparisons to gain traction. For now, the appetite for confirmation bias does not seem to have been sated.
None of that is a reason to downplay baseball’s resurgence, which is real. But it is a reason to discuss baseball’s momentum in its own context, and not as proof of an NBA downfall some have been promising, to no avail, for years.
