Getting a lift from the U.S. Open, NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” delivered the largest MLB audience outside of Opening Day last weekend.
Airing immediately after the final round of the U.S. Open, the latest edition of NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” (Mets-Phillies) averaged a combined 3.00 million viewers across a Nielsen-measured linear audience and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — the largest audience for a Sunday night game since the 2017 season opener (Cubs-Cardinals: 3.6M), and the largest excluding season openers since Yankees-Red Sox in 2013 (3.1M).
The Phillies’ comfortable win delivered the second-largest audience of the MLB season, trailing only NBC’s primetime Diamondbacks-Dodgers game on Opening Day (3.16M). Viewership edged the Opening Night Yankees-Giants game on Netflix (2.97M). (NBC’s position is that because Nielsen does not track its streaming viewership, its combined Nielsen + Adobe audience figures are comparable to the Nielsen-only figures of other networks.)
NBC has now aired four of the six most-watched MLB windows this season, with three of those coming since it began its weekly run of “Sunday Night Baseball” games May 31. The network owns the three largest audiences since Opening Week, with Giants-Cubs two weeks earlier ranking second (2.565M) and Cubs-Cardinals the week prior to that placing third (2.52M).
Most-watched Major League Baseball windows this season
Viewership more-than-doubled the same Mets-Phillies matchup on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” last season (1.47M), but that game aired opposite Game 7 of the NBA Finals. This year’s World Cup competition on Telemundo and FS1 was not quite as steep, if still considerable in its own right.
On Saturday night, FOX averaged 2.45 million for coverage that also featured Mets-Phillies — up sharply from last year, when its coverage was interrupted by breaking news (2.00M). The telecast ranks eighth for the season. FOX accounts for more of the top ten audiences this season than any other network (five).
