MLB’s Strong Attendance, Viewership Due in Part to Rivalry Weekend

MLB is entering the all-important Memorial Day weekend with significant momentum in attendance and viewership, thanks to some power teams and a successful introduction of its Rivalry Weekend promotion.

The long holiday weekend is often a starting point for when these key metrics for the league begin to pick up meaningfully for the critical summer months. This year, however, the league has benefited from a sizable early bump compared to last year.

So far this season, MLB attendance is up by 2% to an average of 27,612 per game, advancing on the 1.3% gain at the beginning of May and helping confirm preseason expectations of a third-straight annual increase at the gate. 

Each of the three main national media-rights partners, meanwhile, has posted viewership increases in the early going of the 2025 season, with ESPN up by 12% despite plans to opt out of its MLB deal after this year, Fox up by 8%, and TNT Sports up by 15%.

A significant piece of that overall lift was the May 16–18 Rivalry Weekend, a scheduling format that had teams across the league playing against a geographically near or historical rival, such as Mets-Yankees, Angels-Dodgers, and White Sox–Cubs. 

The move in some ways harkened back to the earliest iterations of interleague play in the late 1990s, long before it became a much broader and everyday occurrence in MLB. Fans embraced the clustering, as the weekend attendance of 1.6 million represented the league’s largest such total before Memorial Day since 2012. ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball coverage of the finale of the Mets-Yankees series drew an average audience of 2.54 million, marking the most-watched game of the season on any network, and the network’s largest viewership for the primetime showcase since 2018. 

Similarly, MLB said merchandise sales, social media views, and consumption on MLB.TV during Rivalry Weekend also rose by significant, double-digit percentages compared to the same weekend a year ago. 

The creation and promotion of Rivalry Weekend represented another move by the league to elevate portions of a six-month, 162-game schedule, one that will also include the recently announced return of Players’ Weekend in August. That event was revived last year after a five-year hiatus.

The Mets-Yankees series, meanwhile, also offered a crescendo in the ongoing turmoil surrounding Mets outfielder Juan Soto. 

A key element of MLB’s broader attendance and viewership increases has been the presence of big-market superstars such as the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, and Soto. Those three teams are each up meaningfully at the gate so far this season. The Dodgers and Mets will face each other for the first time since the National League Championship Series last Fall, won by Los Angeles. The finale on Sunday will be the next SNB game.