NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” schedule began in earnest last weekend with a better matchup and larger audience than in its two previous editions.
Last weekend’s Cubs-Cardinals “Sunday Night Baseball” game averaged a combined 2.5 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (1.3, 2.30M) and a streaming audience tracked by Adobe Analytics, surpassing the two previous Sunday night games on the network — Guardians-Braves in April (2.2M) and Padres-Mariners in May (2.0M).
The Cardinals’ win ranks second out of the five total MLB games on NBC so far this season, trailing the network’s primetime Diamondbacks-Dodgers game on Opening Day (3.2M).
Viewership actually declined from the equivalent window last year, when “Sunday Night Baseball” featured a World Series rematch between the Yankees and Dodgers that averaged 2.7 million on ESPN. Two out of the three Sunday night games on NBC have declined from last year on ESPN, though in both cases it was because ESPN had a higher-profile matchup last year (Padres-Mariners in May was no match for last year’s Yankees-Mets ‘Subway Series’).
The previous night’s regional slate on FOX, featuring the same Cubs-Cardinals matchup, averaged a 1.2 rating and 2.32 million — up from last year’s window, which was headlined by the Dodgers’ 18-2 rout of the Yankees (2.2M). On the basis of averaging a larger Nielsen-measured audience, Fox said in a social media post Tuesday that its window was the most-watched baseball telecast of the week on any network.
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 — which would make “Sunday Night Baseball” the most-watched window of the week. (Even on a Nielsen-only basis, “Sunday Night Baseball” did come away as the highest rated game of the weekend.)
It is unlikely that this week was the final time this season that there will be some dispute as to which window averaged the larger audience. NBC will air “Sunday Night Baseball” in all-but-two weeks until Labor Day weekend, picking up a regular weekly schedule after spending the first two months of the season primarily on Peacock and NBCSN.
In other MLB action, ESPN averaged a 0.8 rating and 1.63 million for its Memorial Day matinee between the Yankees and Royals, the most-watched of the network’s four game windows this season.
