Whether against the Red Sox or Dodgers, nothing drives baseball viewership quite like the Yankees against a big market rival.
Last weekend’s Dodgers-Yankees “Sunday Night Baseball” game on NBC averaged a combined 3.9 million viewers across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (1.8 rating, 3.62M viewers) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics, trailing only an abbreviated Yankees-Red Sox telecast last month (4.0M) as the most-watched edition of “Sunday Night Baseball” since 2011.
The Yankees’ win, which peaked with 4.6 million in the 9:45 PM ET quarter-hour, also delivered the largest regular season MLB audience in any window since the original “Field of Dreams” game on FOX in 2021.
NBC now owns four of the five largest MLB audiences this season, with Sunday’s game joined by Diamondbacks-Dodgers on Opening Day, Mets-Phillies on Father’s Day and the previously-noted Yankees-Red Sox game. (That list figures to expand this coming weekend, when NBC has the Yankees in another big market matchup against the Phillies.)
The Dodgers and Yankees were also scheduled to play Saturday on FOX immediately following the FIFA World Cup third-place match, but that game was called off due to rain. Instead, FOX sent Giants-Mariners to a full national audience, averaging a 1.2 and 2.64 million.
FOX has lost the lead game of its regional window three times this season, including arguably the two highest-profile games on its schedule — Dodgers-Yankees this past weekend and Red Sox-Yankees in June, which was to lead out of The Belmont Stakes. In each case, the network ended up sending its secondary game to the entire country. Aided by the World Cup lead-in, Giants-Mariners was easily the most-watched of those games, far surpassing the Guardians-Rangers game that aired in place of Red Sox-Yankees last month (0.9, 1.6M) and the Braves-Diamondbacks game that replaced Cubs-Guardians in April (0.7, 1.35M).
Weather also impacted the first game after the All-Star break, Mets-Phillies last Thursday. Airing an hour earlier than scheduled due to poor air quality, the standalone matchup averaged a 0.8 and 1.49 million on ESPN. It was the first standalone ‘second half opener’ in MLB since 2019, when ESPN averaged 1.20 million for Astros-Rangers (in an era before Nielsen began tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates).
