The Dodgers’ acquisition of Tarik Skubal has inflamed no shortage of backlash on social media, and attracted no shortage of eyeballs to television sets.
Tuesday’s Dodgers-Cubs Major League Baseball game averaged 923,000 viewers across TBS, truTV and HBO Max, marking the largest MLB regular season audience on the TNT Sports networks since they began carrying national games in the 2007 season. (That excludes one-game playoffs, which are technically regular season games. A Tigers-Twins one-game playoff in 2009 had 6.5 million on TBS.)
Unlike NBC, FOX or ESPN, TNT Sports games are non-exclusive and often blacked out in the home markets. That includes Dodgers-Cubs, which was blacked out in Chicago.
The Dodgers’ loss, which peaked with 1.1 million, topped the previous high of 912,000 for a Yankees-Mets game in 2022. It is also well beyond the regular season average on TBS of 500,000 viewers, which is up 29% from last year and the network’s highest since 2011.
(As with all record viewership figures, note that Nielsen did not begin tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, did not do so in 100 percent of markets until last year, and is less than a year into a new methodology that combines “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel.)
Two nights earlier, Red Sox-Dodgers averaged a combined 3.8 million on NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (1.9 rating, 3.51M viewers) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — the third-largest audience of the MLB season, behind Dodgers-Yankees last month (3.9M) and abbreviated coverage of a Yankees-Red Sox game in June (4.0M). All three games aired on NBC as part of the “Sunday Night Baseball” package.
Skubal did not play, but made his first appearance in a Dodgers uniform and was shown on NBC’s broadcast greeting his new teammates.
The Dodgers’ loss, which peaked with 4.4 million in the 9:45 PM ET quarter-hour, was the third-straight “Sunday Night Baseball” game to top the three million mark — which NBC says is a first in the history of the franchise, which prior to this season aired on ESPN. NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” is now averaging 2.8 million this season, up 62% from last year on ESPN. (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.)
Between their two-straight titles and their high-profile acquisitions, the Dodgers are being accused of ruining their sport like no team since the Kevin Durant-era Golden State Warriors. Like those Warriors, the Dodgers are nonetheless one of the top draws in the league, second only to the Yankees. (It should be noted that L.A. is currently on a six-game losing streak.)
In other recent MLB action, last weekend’s FOX regional window (Yankees-Cubs in most markets) averaged a 1.4 rating and 2.83 million viewers, the network’s second-largest audience of the season. A week ago Thursday, ESPN averaged a 0.6 and 1.11 million for Nationals-Braves.
