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While Major League Baseball reported solid attendance numbers this year, the story on television was even better.
The league finished the 2025 regular season with strong viewership increases on each of its national TV partners, amplifying momentum building around the sport. The individual figures include:
- ESPN: The network, in its final season with Sunday Night Baseball after 35 years, averaged 1.8 million for all of its MLB regular-season coverage this year, up 21% from 2024.
- Fox: Games on broadcast averaged 2.04 million viewers, up 9%, while cable games on FS1 averaged 324,000 viewers, up 10%.
- TNT Sports: The Warner Bros. Discovery outlet, about to head to Discovery Global in a forthcoming corporate split, averaged 462,000 viewers for its non-exclusive MLB games this year, up 29%.
- MLB Network: The league-run outlet averaged 261,000 viewers for its out-of-market “Showcase” live games, up 13%.
Those broadcasting figures follow a small gain in attendance this season, but one that solidified MLB’s first three-year run of growth at the gates since 2005–07. They also arrive as MLB is completing a set of reworked rights deals for the 2026–28 seasons to reallocate rights being forfeited by ESPN.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the league has agreements in principle on a restructured pact with ESPN that has a greater focus on local broadcasting rights and the MLB.TV out-of-market game package, a new deal with NBC that includes a Sunday night presence and the wild-card playoffs, and another new one with Netflix based in part on the Home Run Derby.
Other key metrics include a 34% increase in consumption for MLB.TV to 19.39 billion minutes, another league record. Average game times edged up by two minutes this year to 2 hours and 38 minutes, but remain well below pre-2023 measures as on-field rules introduced that year, notably the pitch clock, remain deeply impactful. Japanese viewership, which posted big totals during last year’s World Series and this year’s season-opening series, averaged 2.65 million per game this season, up 20% and another record.
Big Local Increases, Too
Game viewership across the league on regional sports networks, meanwhile, grew 2%. Main Street Sports, the largest single operator in that level of baseball broadcasting through its FanDuel Sports Network, said its MLB coverage across 15 owned-and-operated outlets averaged 1.5 million daily viewers across all platforms, an 18% increase from 2024.
The total also continues a turnaround for the company, formerly Diamond Sports Group, as it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year with a new name, a new vision for the business, and a sharply heightened focus on digital access to live games, either on a direct-to-consumer basis or through Amazon Channels. MLB games on FanDuel Sports Network generated more than 2.8 billion minutes of consumption this year, more than twice the comparable number from last year.
“On one part, we were the beneficiary of a really strong baseball season, all the national carriers have done well, and many of our teams have had strong seasons,” FanDuel Sports Network head of research David Coletti tells Front Office Sports. “The other component, perhaps less evident in the numbers themselves, is that our audience has benefited from our ubiquitous access model. … It was really a payoff in this company’s hypothesis, which goes back a year, that if you enable that access for fans on the local level, they will follow.”
