MLB Playoff Ratings Keep Climbing

The MLB playoffs are down to the final four teams, and a combination of star power and big media markets has the league primed for one of its best TV performances in years. according to Front Office Sports.

Fox Sports is airing the Dodgers-Mets National League Championship Series, after recording the most-watched MLB division series since 2015. 

The Dodgers-Padres and Mets-Phillies series combined to average 4.1 million viewers across nine games. That was boosted by a Friday night audience of 7.5 million for Los Angeles’s 2–0 series-clinching victory over San Diego, which was the most-watched LDS Game 5 since 2017. This is the first postseason for baseball’s $700 million man, Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani.

In the American League, TNT Sports gets the Yankees and Guardians. Final viewership from the ALDS has not yet been released, but preliminary numbers show that the Yankees-Royals and Guardians-Tigers series averaged 3 million viewers per game after Thursday—a 20% increase from last year’s ALDS on Fox Sports.

World Series Preview

The Yankees are favored to beat the Guardians, and New York making its first World Series since 2009 would no doubt bring a huge TV audience to MLB’s championship round.

Should that happen, a matchup with the Dodgers would bring potential coast-to-coast appeal, as well as viewers interested in Ohtani, while a faceoff with the Mets would maximize New York’s two-team baseball fan base. However, there are drawbacks to concentrating viewership in one area. In 2000, the Yankees and Mets met in the World Series, and viewership was down 24% from 1999’s Yankees-Braves clash.