The circumstances were less than ideal, but NBC came away with multiple viewership highs for a Sunday night pairing of golf and baseball.
Sunday’s weather-delayed final round of the PGA Tour Travelers Championship averaged a combined 4.2 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics, leading into an abbreviated edition of “Sunday Night Baseball” (Yankees-Red Sox) at 4.0 million — the most-watched editions of each since 2002 and 2011, respectively.
(Note 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 months into a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes will generally skew historical comparisons, particularly to years prior to 2020.)
The golf telecast was originally supposed to run until 7 PM ET, but due to weather did not conclude until 8:27 — a full hour into “Sunday Night Baseball.” Viewership peaked at 5.6 million in the final quarter-hour, compared to a peak audience of 5.4 million last year.
Due to the golf overrun, the first four innings of Yankees-Red Sox aired on Peacock (and NBCSN) and were not Nielsen-rated.
In addition to delivering the largest “Sunday Night Baseball” audience since 2011 — another Yankees-Red Sox game (4.72M) — Boston’s extra-inning comeback win ranks second among all MLB regular season windows over that span, behind only the inaugural Field of Dreams game on FOX in 2021 (5.87M).
NBC now owns the three-largest audiences of the MLB season, with Yankees-Red Sox surpassing the previous week’s Mets-Phillies game (3.00M) — which also had a direct golf lead-in from the U.S. Open — and the network’s primetime Diamondbacks-Dodgers Opening Day game (3.16M). In its first full MLB regular season since 1989, NBC has aired five of the seven most-watched games thus far in just nine total telecasts.
(While it is true that just about any MLB game would benefit from cutting the first three innings, it is generally accepted practice to report viewership only for the portion of a game that airs as scheduled. When sporting events are preempted, either by late-running games or world events, the preempted portion is generally not included in the final viewership figure, even if coverage is bumped to another Nielsen-rated network.)
In addition to the Travelers Championship and “Sunday Night Baseball,” NBC carried the final round of the Women’s PGA Championship, which was also delayed due to weather. The tournament averaged 1.4 million viewers across its scheduled afternoon window and live coverage of the conclusion — which aired during weather delay coverage of the PGA Tour event — the highest for the event since 2005.
