Coming off of a dramatic World Series with global appeal, baseball has kept the good times going into the World Baseball Classic.
The first two United States games of the World Baseball Classic, against Brazil Friday night and Great Britain on Saturday, averaged 2.64 and 2.98 million viewers respectively on FOX — both up considerably from the team’s lone pool play game on FOX in 2023, a matchup against Great Britain that drew 1.48 million.
The Saturday game, which peaked with 3.74 million in the 10 PM ET quarter-hour, ranks as the second-most watched in the history of the event (six editions dating back to 2006) — behind only the 2023 Japan-United States final (4.48M). (That apparently does not include Spanish-language simulcast viewership, which would bring the 2017 United States-Puerto Rico final up to 3.05 million.)
Keep in mind that Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, only began doing so in 100 percent of markets a year ago, and is six months into a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. All things being equal, it is likely that some games from past years — including a United States-Japan semifinal in 2009 (2.78M) and U.S.-Venezuela pool play game the same year (2.65M) — would rank higher.
Both games more than held their own opposite the competition, with Friday’s ranking as the most-watched sporting event of the day and Saturday’s trailing only the Duke-North Carolina men’s college basketball game on ESPN (3.43M).
Compared to actual Major League Baseball games, the games would rank among last season’s five most-watched regular season windows (second and fourth), alongside two matchups of the Yankees and Red Sox (6/7: 3.0M; 8/24: 2.6M) and a Yankees-Dodgers World Series rematch (6/1: 2.7M). Viewership is of course not comparable to postseason games, at least not at this point of the tournament. The first two rounds of the playoffs averaged 4.3 million, and the ALCS and NLCS averaged 5.0 and 4.7 million respectively.
