As “Sunday Night Baseball” starts to settle into a routine on NBC, the viewers may be following suit.
The latest edition of NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” (Giants-Cubs) averaged a combined 2.57 million viewers across a Nielsen-estimated linear audience (1.3 rating, 2.34M viewers) and streaming viewership measured by Adobe Analytics — marking the largest MLB audience on any network since the Opening Week of the season.
Overall, the Giants’ extra-inning win delivered the fourth-largest audience of the MLB season, trailing three Opening Week windows — NBC’s primetime Diamondbacks-Dodgers game on Opening Day (3.2M), the Yankees-Giants Opening Night game on Netflix (2.97M), and the season premiere of MLB on FOX (2.59M).
(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.)
Viewership increased 34% from Red Sox-Yankees on ESPN last year (1.92M), which aired opposite the NBA Finals. This year’s game faced no such competition.
For the second-straight week, “Sunday Night Baseball” was the most-watched MLB window on any network, though that comes with a caveat this time around. FOX was to air Red Sox-Yankees Saturday night immediately following its presentation of horse racing’s Belmont Stakes, just as it did a year ago — a programming strategy that last year resulted in an audience of 3.0 million viewers, the largest of the regular season. But this year’s Red Sox-Yankees game was a rainout, forcing FOX to present its secondary game (Guardians-Rangers) to the entire country.
Airing in a fully national window, Guardians-Rangers averaged a 0.9 rating and 1.6 million viewers, the second-smallest audience of the season on FOX — topping only another rain-altered window in April, when the network lost its featured Cubs-Guardians game and presented Braves-Diamondbacks to the entire country instead (1.35M).
In the five weeks that NBC has carried a Major League Baseball game this season, it has aired the most-watched game on any network four times.
