From Lowest-Viewed World Series To ESPN Opt Out To RSNs, How MLB’s Media Landscape Looks

With the Texas Rangers winning the World Series, Major League Baseball officially wrapped up their 2023 season. From a viewership perspective, it created a host of narratives. But, should any of it affect the league’s national or regional media rights deals?

Fans of the Rangers will undoubtedly be giddy today given that they had never won a World Series. The club had spent more than any of the other 29 others in MLB over the last two years, so in many ways it should have been no surprise.

But baseball is baseball. By that I mean, it is the most team-centric of all the major sports. Where basketball or football can see one player greatly swing game outcome, baseball requires focusing on the entire roster. To emphasize that, Game 5 of the World Series was a microcosm of this fact. Arizona’s Zac Gallen did not allow a hit through six innings and had retired 14 batters before ever issuing a walk. And yet, the Diamondback’s bats were lifeless going 0 for 9 with runners in scoring position.

With that in mind, baseball is brand-driven. Other sports star star-driven. And given that the Rangers and Diamondbacks were in the Fall Classic, it set itself for low viewership.

With the final numbers in, the 2023 World Series was the least-viewed since Nielsen began tracking. Averaging 9.1 million, it sank below the 2020 “bubble” series during the pandemic between the Dodgers and Rays (averaged 9.9 million).

FOX made lemonades out of lemons with Game 5 which averaged 11.6 million viewers across all their platforms and won the night. Sports and the teams that make the championships are cyclical. Parity is important. Whether 2023 is a bust for national viewership gets into whether you want a handful of big brands in the World Series and the other teams are simply there as fodder for the regular season. Not every year can be a Yankees, or Red Sox, or Dodgers, or Cubs championship, and as a fan you say thank goodness for that.

But the media landscape, which has seen subscribers flee traditional television for streaming services, adds a bit to the MLB postseason malaise in viewership.

As noted, it’s one year but comes at a time when ESPN and MLB have a mutual opt-out at the end of the 2025 season for their national broadcast deal, which includes the Wild Card series. Overall, ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball was down -2% on the season, but speaking with Phil Orllins, Vice President, Production for MLB, he said that was largely due to having a slate with the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets in a down year for both. He said those clubs accounted for 25 of 30 broadcast windows and therefore, he was bullish on the season. “To be basically flat under those circumstances is, I think, a really good sign about the overall health and interest in [Major League Baseball].”

On the regional sports network side, it was impossible to not have the Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy not hang over the league. MLB took over the rights to the Padres and Diamondbacks mid-season from DSG, and with them controlling the majority of MLB regional sports networks, it should not be surprising if the league took over the majority of them as either DSG foregoes making rights payments, or contracts expire, opening the door for MLB to produce and work carriage deals for them. In aggregate, the RSNs were up +7% during the 2023 regular season (see numbers for all 29 U.S. teams here), with most of them ranking #1 in primetime. That’s important given other non-sports content in the DVR era has seen drop dramatically in viewership over the last few years.

There will be a lot of discussion about MLB’s playoff format that saw marquee brands that handily won their divisions get knocked off in the early rounds by wild card teams. That is the randomness of a sport that sees 3-game, 5-game, and 7-game series play for their postseason. But using 2023 as a measuring stick doesn’t mean subsequent years will follow suit. And that randomness lends itself to the parity component. Since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees, MLB has not seen a repeat World Series winner.