ESPN Finds Viewership Success With Updated MLB Wild Card Series

One of the lesser stories told is how Major League Baseball continues to be a coveted sports property for television networks and streaming platforms due to the large inventory of games played during its regular season. What has largely gone unanswered is whether the postseason still holds sway with fans when their favorite team may not be playing as the sport marches towards a more regionalized audience. Data from Nielsen via ESPN shows that the now three-game Wild Card series was a success.

With the new labor deal between MLB and the players, an additional Wild Card team was added to the postseason in the American and National League. The two additional teams shifted the format from the sudden death play-in Wild Card format to a best of 3 with ESPN picking up the broadcast rights.

The question left unanswered was, do fans have more interest in the “win or go home” format, or the best of 3 games? The answer is out.

This year, Walt Disney
DIS
-owned ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC combined to average 2.8 million viewers across nine games, up from 1.7 million viewers for 18 games in 2020, the last time there was a Wild Card Series. That registered as a 64% increase.

Those 18 games saw just one series go the full three games (the Mariners-Blue Jays, Rays-Guardians, and Phillies-Cardinals were two-game sweeps) but when getting to that deciding Game 3, viewership bounced. Game 3 of the San Diego Padres vs. New York Mets series generated nearly four million viewers (3,961,000), peaking with 4.73 million viewers from 8-8:15 pm ET on Sunday, October 9.

“We were extremely happy with the viewership of the Wild Card Series,” said Rick Mace, ESPN senior manager of programming & acquisitions. “Being the first year of a new format, it was difficult to know what exactly to expect seeing how the closest model was the 2020 event. We consider this a tremendous start to our Wild Card Series games and a strong indicator that these will only increase in future years with the possibility of more game 3s.”

Showing the strength of having games on ABC, Game 1 of the Philadelphia Phillies vs. St. Louis Cardinals series, which had a Friday afternoon ET time slot averaged 3.1 million viewers. The broadcast peaked at 4.58 million viewers at 5:15 pm ET.

And according to Mace, the network saw programming before and after the games bolstered, such as SportsCenter. The game windows on ESPN2 for Saturday, October 8 did exceedingly well, delivering the second and third most-watched ESPN2 telecasts of 2022, behind only the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day.

The narrative that baseball is somehow dying continues to get pushback via the viewership numbers and a large number of MLB games.

“Major League Baseball remains vital and essential content for us,” Mace said to me for Forbes. “It’s an elite-level sports media property and the widespread viewership success across our platforms, including the Wild Card Series, cements that fact. The Wild Card Series has added tremendous value and we’re looking forward to continuing to grow the event for years to come.”