After all these years, Red Sox-Yankees is still the biggest television draw in baseball.
Tuesday’s Red Sox-Yankees MLB American League Wild Card Series Game 1 averaged 7.3 million viewers across NBC platforms, per a Nielsen-measured audience that includes NBC’s first-party streaming data — marking the second-most watched Wild Card game under the best-of-three format that began in 2022. Only last year’s Red Sox-Yankees Game 3 on ESPN averaged a larger audience (7.4M).
The Yankees’ win, which peaked with 8.5 million, increased 12% from Game 1 of last year’s Wild Card Series between the same two teams on ESPN (6.5M).
Red Sox-Yankees now accounts for the four largest audiences in the short history of the Wild Card Series, with Game 1 joining last year’s three games. Wednesday’s Game 2 seems likely to make it five for five.
Including the years when the Wild Card round consisted of single-elimination games, Game 1 was the sixth-most watched since the round was added to the postseason in 2012. Yankees-Red Sox games account for five of the top 11, including a single-elimination matchup on ESPN and ESPN2 in 2021 (7.7M).
Not counting the All-Star Game and Home Run Derby, Yankees-Red Sox also delivered the two largest audiences of the MLB season thus far, with their regular season “Sunday Night Baseball” meeting on NBC placing second at 3.96 million.
Earlier Tuesday, Phillies-Braves Game 1 averaged 3.9 million on the NBC networks — up 15% from Padres-Cubs on ABC last year (3.4M). Atlanta’s win, which peaked with 5.0 million in the 4:30 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the third-largest audience for a non-primetime Wild Card game, behind Tigers-Guardians Game 3 on ABC last year (4.15M) and the very first Wild Card game back in 2012, Cardinals-Braves on TBS (3.99M).
The other two Wild Card games — White Sox-Astros and Cubs-Padres — aired on Peacock and NBCSN, figures for which have generally not been publicized.
NBC now owns the five largest audiences of the MLB season across the two series openers on Tuesday and three “Sunday Night Baseball” regular season games — the aforementioned Yankees-Red Sox (3.96M), Dodgers-Yankees (3.94M) and Red Sox-Dodgers (3.80M). Note that the regular season figures combine a Nielsen-measured linear audience with streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics.
NBC, as previously noted, averaged 2.7 million for “Sunday Night Baseball” during the regular season. An average across all NBC windows was not immediately available. The network ended its regular season slate on Labor Day weekend averaging 2.3 million for a Braves-Phillies matinee September 6 and 2.0 million for Giants-Cardinals in primetime September 7.
Fox Sports said this week that it had the most-watched MLB package of the regular season, averaging 2.35 million for its FOX broadcast network windows — up 15% from last year and its highest average in five years. FS1 chipped in 359,000 for its games, up 11% and its highest since 2018.
FOX finished its schedule with a 0.7 and 1.34 million for Rays-Phillies on Saturday, which it sent to the entire country after its primary Orioles-Yankees game was postponed due to rain. The network lost its primary game of its regional window four different times this season, three of them involving the Yankees.
ESPN averaged 1.2 million for its 30-game package across ESPN and ABC, including 1.8 million for ABC’s three games and 1.1 million for 27 games on the ESPN flagship. The network finished its season a week ago Wednesday with 1.4 million for White Sox-Guardians and 685,000 for Mariners-Astros.
TBS did not disclose a viewership average for its games this season, but said that its audience was up 11% from last year (462K) and its highest since 2011.
