Major League Baseball got the matchup it’s wanted for years in this year’s World Series, as Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers will clash with Aaron Judge and the New York Yankees for the championship.
While few follow the sport or love it as much as ESPN MLB insider Jeff Passan, he believes the audience this mega-series gets will be very informative for decision-makers in the league office about how extensive a fan base it has in the country right now.
Passan explained in an interview with The Dan Patrick Show on Monday why, despite it being a given that this World Series will draw huge viewership, just how big the ratings get will be more important than just taking a victory lap over the year-over-year growth.
“To me, what this series serves as is a litmus test for how big Major League Baseball’s national audience actually can get,” Passan said.
Postseason viewership has been up for ESPN, Fox Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery this year as superstar players and major-market teams dominated. And not only are the pennant winners the big brother teams from the two biggest cities in the country, they also feature perennial MVPs and Cy Young winners.
Any reasonable prediction would see the Yankees-Dodgers scoring better with TV audiences than last year’s Rangers-Diamondbacks nadir. But Passan said how big the audience balloons to will be instructive for MLB going forward.
“I don’t know that in terms of television ratings, in terms of interest from large media markets, in terms of the things that tend to lead to eyeballs on a series like this, I feel like you can’t do better,” Passan explained on The Dan Patrick Show. “So I feel like we’re going to see the ceiling for Major League Baseball here nationally, and it’s going to be really good to have that baseline to understand, OK, just how much has the national interest in the sport waned in recent years? And how much room is there to grow beyond that as you try to bring it back from being more of a local, more of a parochial game than it’s ever been before and take it back to the national leviathan that it was, once upon a time?”
MLB has not had a World Series average more than 10 million viewers for each game since 2016, when the Chicago Cubs broke one of the most historic championship curses in American sports. Before that, you have to go back to 2009 — the last time the Yankees made it in.
Baseball’s broadcast rights deal expires in 2028, but ESPN can opt out of its package — which centers on Sunday Night Baseball and the Wild Card round of the postseason — next year. At the same time, MLB is stuck in an ongoing nightmare with its local broadcasts.
As the league considers future negotiations at the national level and the idea of selling its local packages to a national bidder, this series figures to be particularly informative about the true value of baseball to American viewers right now.
