Major League Baseball enjoyed a resurgent regular season, with overall linear TV viewership up 26% through the first three months of the 2023 campaign and full-season ballpark attendance enjoying its biggest year-over-year spike ever (9.6%) to over 70.7 million ticket buyers.
Meanwhile, the league also said that MLB.TV enjoyed its most streamed season in its 21-year history, with engagement increasing 9% to 12.7 billion viewing minutes and the number of users up 14%.
But this resurgence, fueled by the new “pitch-clock” rules, baseball experts speculate, has not carried into the post-season, which this year returned a relatively new format that started last season.
Total viewing across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 for last week's MLB "wild card round" was down 18%, according to Nielsen data, with four two-game sweeps averaging 2.25 million viewers vs. 2.73 million last season.
Meanwhile, through Tuesday, the four MLB Division Series on TBS, truTV, Fox and FS1 are collectively down 15% in viewership, averaging 2.78 million viewers vs. 3.28 million for the comparable first 10 games of the 2022 divisional round, according to Nielsen data compiled by Sports Media Watch.
Three of the four divisional-round series have already ended in three-game sweeps, with the only competitive matchup, the Philadelphia Phillies's defeat of the Atlanta Braves in four games, scoring the largest TV audience, 4.05 million viewers through Tuesday, up 19% over Turner's comparable audience in 2022.
Sports media pundits don't expect the news to get any better for the upcoming American and National League championship series, not to mention the World Series.
MLB may as well just stream the World Series on Friendster or whatever, because the Nielsen meters will not be kind.October 12, 2023
The upcoming ALCS between the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers (Fox, FS1) seems confined to intense but limited regional appeal. Pundits don't seem too impressed by the audience potential of an NLCS (TBS) pitting the up-and-coming Arizona Diamondbacks against the Philadelphia Phillies, either.
Meanwhile, the big-market draws like the New York Yankees, who didn't make the playoffs, and Los Angeles Dodgers, who meekly succumbed to the Diamondbacks Wednesday evening, are not in the forward-looking playoff picture.
Notably, a very possible rematch of last year’s World Series (Fox), which saw the Astros defeat the Phillies in six games, would probably not be, er, boffo. The 2022 iteration averaged 12.03 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes and streaming, making it the second least-watched Fall Classic ever.
