Nielsen: Radio Scores On MLB Opening Day

With the 2014 Major League Baseball season now underway, hope is springing eternal in baseball towns across the country as the long march toward the postseason has begun. Familiar hometown announcer voices have started filling the radio airwaves, re-kindling the original form of live sports broadcasting over a mass platform, engaging local audiences and bringing them into all of the action of the budding season.

Accoridng to Nielsen, passion for baseball and the enthusiasm that it translates into for local teams can be a boon for local radio on opening day, as it often draws the largest regular-season listening audience to a team’s hometown flagship radio station. And just as in prior years, the early results that Nielsen hqw tracked from last Monday’s games around the country reveal some impressive double-digit listening shares for several flagship broadcasters. And those results demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of fans tuned in for the first pitch, stayed with the game through the workday, and listened on the commute home.

What’s also apparent is that fan passion may be the most important factor in determining the ratings for an opening day broadcast—even more so than what time the first pitch was thrown, what the weather was like, and how the team performed.

In order to get a sample of what the audio landscape looked like across the league on Monday, Nielsen took a look at the preliminary data for four opening day games for both the visiting and home teams’ flagship broadcast stations.