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, according to NextTV, the 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.
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 still-going series between the Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves, scoring the largest TV audience, 4.05 million viewers, 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.
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