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The New York Yankees took two out of three from their crosstown rivals, the New York Mets, over the weekend, and the baseball world was watching in record numbers.
The series finale on Sunday averaged 2.54 million viewers and peaked at 3.02 million, according to a release from ESPN. That made it the most-watched Sunday Night Baseball game on ESPN in seven years and the most-watched MLB game this season on any platform.
The game also represented a 69 percent increase over last year's Sunday Night Baseball average and MLB viewership overall is up on ESPN by 12 percent.
Those numbers come as Sunday Night Baseball may be coming to an end on ESPN — though increased viewership may incentivize the Worldwide Leader to work something out with MLB. Earlier this year, ESPN opted out of the remaining three years of its contract with MLB as neither side seemed thrilled with the other.
In a memo that The Athletic obtained in March, commissioner Rob Manfred said the league had “not been pleased with the minimal coverage that MLB has received on ESPN’s platforms over the past several years outside of the actual live game coverage.”
The Athletic also reported that MLB could shop its current package with ESPN in three parts, giving the Home Run Derby to Fox and Sunday night games to NBC.
With so much uncertainty around the future of baseball on ESPN, the network is enjoying what it has for now. The Yankees beat the Mets 8-2 on Sunday, but the game was far more intriguing than the score indicates. The two teams entered the eighth inning tied at 2-2 before the Yankees exploded for six runs, highlighted by a Cody Bellinger grand slam.
Max Fried, meanwhile, was in command for six innings. He and Bellinger were the Yankees' response to Juan Soto signing with the Mets, and as Soto went 1-10 on the weekend, it gave the Bombers a sense of vindication. Soto, for his part, reportedly snubbed ESPN, who wanted to mic him up during the game, then skipped out on postgame media.
