MLB Attendance and Ratings on the Rise at Midway Point

MLB is entering the second half of its season with a solid dose of business momentum that not only has retained the historic gains of a year ago but also in many respects adds to them.

The league and national media partner Fox Sports registered an average audience of 7.6 million viewers for Tuesday’s All-Star Game across the network’s platforms, a 6% gain from a year ago and retaining the game’s status as the most-watched All-Star event in all of U.S. pro sports. Perhaps even more notably, Pittsburgh was the game’s top individual market for the first time in nearly five decades, said network executive Michael Mulvihill.

That turnout in the Steel City was no doubt burnished by the frenzy around heralded Pirates rookie pitcher Paul Skenes, who started the game for the National League and has rapidly become one of the game’s top stories. 

The All-Star Game viewership, however, is just one metric in a series of gains thus far this season for the league. Among the others:

• Attendance: The league is averaging 28,805 tickets sold per game, up nearly 1% from a year ago. But critically for the league, the slight increase retains all of the 9.6% boost from 2023 that was fueled heavily by the successful introduction of MLB’s pitch clock. The league is also doing so despite the soon-relocating A’s averaging a paltry 7,731 per game, a figure just 60% of MLB’s second-worst home draw, the Marlins. 
• National TV ratings: ESPN and Fox are posting gains for their MLB coverage, with ESPN up by 6% to an average of 1.59 million per game, and Fox is enjoying a similar 7% bump to an average of 1.98 million per game. 
• The draft: MLB’s efforts to put more attention on its draft, and its young talent more broadly, are paying off as the first-round coverage on ESPN and the MLB Network drew a combined average audience of 863,000. While still a fraction of the comparable numbers for the NFL and NBA, the figure was still up by 16% from a year ago and the event’s second-best figure on record. 

Remaining Hurdles

Even with those results, MLB still has a series of pressing issues, as it did at the start of the season, including the near- and long-term future of the A’s, the rebuked Nike-designed uniforms now being corrected, the status of the bankrupt Diamond Sports Group, and growing economic imbalance within the game.

Monday’s Home Run Derby, meanwhile, posted an average audience of 5.45 million, an 11% drop and that competition’s worst mark since 2014. The viewership decrease arrived as an adjusted competitive format did not deliver the excitement this event has seen in prior years.  

Regular-season MLB play will resume Friday with 14 games.