Major League Baseball and Fox Sports have the matchup of their dreams in this year’s World Series: the Los Angeles Dodgers vs. the New York Yankees.
Due to the size of the markets and the pedigree of the franchises, baseball’s boosters have reason to be bullish about the ratings potential of the Fall Classic. Viewership in the postseason has already been trending well, with the American and National league championship series averaging 5.35 million viewers on Fox, FS1 and TBS, the best since 2017.
A similar surge for the Series would prompt celebrations in the short term, though MLB at the same time faces significant media uncertainty due to a jigsaw puzzle of rights deals, some major pieces of which could be shuffled in 2025. That’s when ESPN and MLB have a mutual opt-out of their $550M-a-year rights deal, and also when MLB itself could end up distributing several teams’ games due to the slow-motion meltdown of regional sports networks.
Those headaches can wait, though. This October brings the rarest of duels, and the bicoastal nature of it will have Le Tout Showbiz tuned in, at a minimum. Media coverage and industry attention are already hitting peak levels. In one indication of that, the Los Angeles Times assigned reporter Noah Goldberg to write stories about the clash’s societal and cultural relevance beyond the diamond. (Goldberg, a lifelong Yankees fan, described the main riddle he’s out to solve in a post on X: “How are the cities doing? How do they feel about each other?”)
A Yankees-Dodgers championship tilt was once a common occurrence, but the last of the teams’ 12 Series meetings came in 1981. In fact, there hasn’t been a New York-L.A. faceoff in any of the four major professional sports over that same span, though the Yankees-San Diego Padres World Series in 1998 and the Lakers-New Jersey Nets NBA Finals in 2002 came close.
With presumably pent-up demand and broadcast sports showing healthy tune-in of late, where will the bar be?
An average of 41M viewers tuned in across six games for the last Yankees vs. Dodgers World Series in 1981, according to Nielsen. This time around, that number is basically an impossibility, as linear television viewership has rapidly declined over the past two decades, even for sports. The NFL regularly surpasses 20M viewers, and toward the end of the regular season may see a rare 30M-plus viewers for a single game, but the Super Bowl remains the only program on linear TV that will amass anything more. It’s still going strong, breaking records as the most-watched telecast in history almost every year.
Back to baseball, it’s more than likely that the Dodgers and the Yankees will breathe some life back into the World Series after a few tough years. Last year’s showdown between the Texas Rangers and the Arizona Diamondbacks averaged an all-time low of just over 9M viewers across the five-game series, after it had managed to bounce back just a bit from the previous low, when just 9.79M tuned in to watch the Dodgers win in Covid-stricken 2020.
Last year’s Series only went to five games, which surely contributed to the low turnout, as the audience generally improves when a series goes farther. The Rangers and Diamondbacks are also teams with decidedly regional followings, and more marquee draws like the Dodgers and the Yankees, especially together, will draw a much larger crowd.
The last time that two marquee teams met in the World Series was 2021, when the Atlanta Braves bested the Houston Astros. That series averaged 11.7M viewers. The 2024 World Series has serious potential to surpass that number for several reasons.
The Dodgers have had a few recent World Series appearances, but the Yankees haven’t made it to the championship since 2009, when they defeated the Phillies with an average audience of 19.3M viewers across six games, which ups the ante for this year.
Both teams also have huge stars, who will surely be a draw for even more casual sports viewers, like the Yankees’ Juan Soto and Aaron Judge. It’s also the first postseason for Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers, the Japanese phenom whose exploits (pitching, hitting and playing in the field, at least before this season; hitting 50-plus home runs and stealing 50-plus bases in the same year) have upended the game.
Even if the action doesn’t go to six or seven games (increasing ad revenue opportunities), Fox is still expecting the games to far outperform its usual primetime lineup.
The network is averaging about 2M viewers in primetime across scripted and unscripted programming since the start of the fall broadcast season. The World Series is kicking off on a Friday night, which on Fox usually consist of college sports — particularly college football as of late. Last week, Oregon-Purdue managed 2.15M viewers in the 8 p.m. ET slot. Safe to say, this World Series will likely blow that number out of the water.
While there is evident appeal on the East and West coasts of the U.S. for this Series, the international numbers should also be significant, as evidenced by the playoff tune-in to date. MLB estimated that Game 1 of the NLCS between the Dodgers and the New York Mets averaged 12.1M viewers in Japan, making it the second most-watched MLB postseason game in the nation’s history.
In the U.S. and for the bulk of the 162-game regular season, baseball is an exceedingly local TV sport. Regional sports networks, which sprouted up in the 1990s, have been the default way for baseball fans to follow their local teams. In the era of cord-cutting and streaming, however, they have fallen on extremely hard times. Diamond Sports Group operates the largest string of RSNs, the Bally Sports portfolio (recently rebranded by FanDuel, only adding to the confusion). The collection of nearly two dozen formerly Fox-run RSNs were acquired by Sinclair and other investors in 2019 as part of Disney’s acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox. In March 2023, Diamond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The bankruptcy process has unfolded in molasses-like fashion over the past 18 months, with Diamond presenting its plan to creditors for how to emerge and resume its previous role in the ecosystem. MLB has wound up with rights to nearly a dozen teams for 2025. Though some have since been reclaimed by teams, the league has reportedly mulled creating a national streaming hub to reach fans across multiple markets. That could hit the spot for a lot of avid viewers, many of whom have voiced criticism of the national broadcast crews in recent weeks.
Play-by-play and color voices from the regional broadcasts do not continue into the playoffs. Instead, national figures like Bob Costas and Joe Davis handle the lead announcing chores. Costas, as revered as he is in general, earned some of the harshest reviews of his career during TBS playoff broadcasts, with the caustic reception trending on social media. RSN calls, with familiar local voices, could be provided as an alternate telecast, it has been argued.
Cable is cable, though. For sports, it’s all about broadcast television. The 80-year-old medium is likely to come away one of the biggest October winners no matter which team prevails on the field.
Broadcast networks “remain the best place to find the simultaneous reach advertisers and sports leagues covet,” MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a recent report on streaming’s overall impact. “As linear subscriptions and viewership continue to fade, top content has continued to seek higher ground, moving from cable to broadcast. Having a broadcast network, therefore, has increasingly become a must in the eyes of top sports leagues when evaluating distribution partners. While leagues are also increasingly comfortable partnering with streamers, as the NFL Thursday Night Football transition from Fox to Amazon showed, doing so still presents a tradeoff in viewership.”
