MLB is currently beating the NBA in every domestic viewership metric – so why are they treated so differently?

42 comments

1. Isn’t this misleading? Aren’t there way more nationally televised nba games than mlb games?

   Those World Series ratings are great though. I wonder how much that has to do with Ohtani.

2. NBA has a younger fan base and advertisers/networks are obsessed with the 25 to 54 demographic.

3. Having the words “Domestic” and “Beating” are sure gonna trigger some search engines…

4. Anyone watch the NBA recently? It’s an awful product. Your eyeballs are filled to the max with advertisements, the play is constantly stopping, and defense is almost non existent cuz the rules favor the offense so heavily. Might as well just watch shooting practice

5. Thank you Dodgers.

6. All the numbers are “misleading”. Televised games aren’t readily available, only a handful of teams are televised more often. The NBA has a younger fan base. They watch from their phone or watch when they going out. Older fans tend to watch at home, which is what baseball has.

7. Nba is way better at marketing than the MLB. We had like 1 ad all year showing off some talent in the league. The league should be taking advantage of the Hispanic market with Vlad, Maikel Garcia, Salvy, Acuna, Tatis…
   Or the young up and coming stars Bobby Witt, Julio Rodriguez, Skenes, Skubal.. but nope we got 1 basic ad all year. Nba is great at selling their product

8. NBA players took control of the league.

9. I have loved baseball since I was a child, but I have always hated the marketing of the MLB. They do nothing to create stars and make them global. The MLB has a marketing problem.

10. I don’t watch the NBA until February or March

11. There’s no rivalry in basketball. It’s watered down trash anymore.

12. Personally, I haven’t watched a full NBA game since 2018-2019, it just became nothing but advertising everywhere you look, the obvious gambling problem including the players, no passion, ZERO defense, it’s literally just a free for all to see who makes the best dunk so they can post it on social media

13. Adam Silver himself said he’d rather people watch highlights than the actual games

14. Advertising and sports betting. You can sell sneakers but you can’t sell cleats and ever since Jordan there has rarely been a high-profile baseball player with major pop culture endorsement deals. And on the sports betting side, basketball is the preferred sport since it’s the most malleable to shape into a preferred end result.

15. For me, watching baseball is like watching a movie that’s a little different each night.

    The pace and action of the game allow you pay as much attention as you like. You can have a game on in the background (and still have a really good idea of what’s going on) or be completely glued to your couch.

    Every night there are new main characters in the form of the starting pitchers and literally anything can happen because baseball at its core is chaos. The action comes from swinging a stick at a ball moving 100mph and the even the best even NASA-level analysts can do is give an informed guess where that ball might go.

    Announcers fill the lulls in the action with conversation and insight about the players you’re watching which leads to a more personal connection.

    Then there’s the aspect of baseball where even if a team is down by five funs, they’re never truly out of it or if a game’s a blowout, you can have some laughs along with the announcers and see a left fielder pitch for the first time since Little League.

    With the NBA, the game is all just a run up to the final few minutes. While you’ll see some cool highlights along the way, the game doesn’t matter until the end and more often than not, the end is excruciated because the game grinds to a halt when strategy finally comes into play.

    Buzzer beaters are certainly thrilling but not when it takes half an hour to get to one.

16. If you want higher broadcast rights fees, just increase the number of games broadcast nationwide. MLB plays twice as many games as the NBA, yet fewer of its games are broadcast nationwide.

17. Basketball is unwatchable. They can’t play for more than 5 seconds without some sort of stoppage.

18. I gotta say, this issue is bringing to light the thing I hate about mlb fans, yall got like old little man syndrome. Yall are just shit talking the nba (some with weird race undertones) and not taking any accountability for your own league. We’re just goofing around in r/nba while people get angry and weird here

19. Metro populations of the competing cities are,
    NBA: 3.5M = 1.4M (OKC) + 2.1M (Indianapolis)
    MLB: 24.7M = 6.4M (Toronto) + 18.3M

    So 7x bigger for the MLB this year compared to the NBA. Even though theres obviously a ton of people watching outside the competing teams’ cities, the baseline this year was much lower. Thats why league owners hate small market teams making it to the top

20. To the last couple of paragraphs?

    1. For one-half of the same reason baseball doesn’t have a salary cap — fractious owners with a hobbled commissioner. It’s not just MLB vs NBA; that part is MLB vs NFL and versus the non-big three other white meat NHL.

    2. Per your own notes, 2 of the last 6 years, the NBA Finals has finished ahead.

    ==

    As for the NBA’s version of “get off my lawn you whippersnappers” commenters?

    Yes, this is not the “Bad Boy Knicks” and thuggish Pistons NBA of the 1990s. And, it’s better for it. Now, have non-calls on traveling gotten even worse? Yes. The three-ball? That’s on coaches not restraining less-than-stellar three-point shooters. Otherwise, if the math is there, then shoot it.

21. I think it’s manly how they are both marketed and the NBA markets their superstars better than any professional league

22. Probably bc the NBA is on national tv and baseball sticks to regional channels.

    So networks talk about what is shown on their network to promote it. 

23. Basketball is boring, and squeaky. It is fun to *play* but, like golf, its boring to watch on TV. Run, shoot, make, throw, run shoot, make, throw, run, pass, pass, shot, make, throw, run, pass, shoot, rebound, shoot, rebound, run back, dunk.

    Final score 35395 to 35396

24. The MLB has made great strides to improve the quality of the product, and the NBA has slid in the opposite direction. Adam Silver has gone on record of saying that the NBA is a “highlight league” and they 100% treat it that way. The rules of the game are optional, and always come after vibes. Anything goes, so long as there is a highlight. For anyone who actually appreciates the competitive aspect of a pro sports league the MLB is great, the NBA is trash.

25. I love MLB, I love the NBA when the Knicks are good, so I enjoyed the 2025 NBA playoffs. I wish refs would swallow their whistles. It is hard to even figure out what some of these phantom fouls are and with all the gambling scandals it just leads fans to believe refs are playing favorites

26. nba is cuckoo

    

    that’s the prob.

27. > Dodgers hate-watchers

    Heyyy, some of us are here for our boys in blue.

28. Manfred wasn’t given the amount of grace Silver was. Not to mention just before the pandemic, there were lots of commentators declaring baseball as a regional sport.

    That hasn’t happened to the NBA.

29. Adam Silver is good friends with Bob Iger, who happens to be the CEO of Disney since forever ago, which runs ESPN. We can start there.

30. Imagine it being 2025 and people still using antiquated metrics like ‘ratings’ to determine a sport’s popularity.

    The athletes with the largest social media followings are all NBA players. Lebron, Steph, KD.

    The MLB player with the most social media followers – no surprise, it’s Ohtani with 9M and he has four times as many as the second MLB player. Russel Westbrook, for example, has over 23M.

    Now, you may sit there and state that social media followers do not matter – but that would be ignorant at best. Social media is what drives engagement and why the NBA media rights deal (and team valuations) dwarf MLB.

31. Because they allow teams to purchase titles

32. Could it be that basketball is the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. . .? Could it be that baseball is, if you slow down for two seconds, much much more interesting and engaging to watch than basketball?

33. It seems like comparing *any random NBA game* specifically to Sunday Night baseball isn’t a fair comparison.

    What is the average vierwship on any random baseball game vs any random NBA game?

    Also, where are the growth metrics? Because the NBA is one of the biggest risers among younger viewers – which not only means more money now but more money in the future.

34. The NBA is also in a turnover right now and they haven’t had one since Jordan left as Kobe rolled right into LeBron. A lot of NBA fans noped out after Jordan’s era was done and we had like San Antonio and the Nets in the finals or something like that.

    The NBA is a star driven league and none of the old guard was in the finals last year. Outside of maybe Doncic how many casual sports fans can name an NBA player under 25/26?

    Meanwhile the World Series just had the most recognizable player in the world play in a World Series and do so both as a pitcher and hitter for the first time an anybody alive lifetime.

    If somehow LeBron and Luka and the Lakers make a finals run against a Healthy Philly, the NBA numbers will be just fine. Let’s not act like MLB has 1 good postseason rating since 2017/2018 whenever the Cubs won and everything is suddenly fixed.

    I’ve also never been blacked out trying to watch an NBA game.

35. You can watch baseball with a 40 year old TV and a coat hanger, you need cable to watch NBA

36. domestic is the key here. NBA does crazy international viewing numbers. check out the chinese viewership numbers of the portland trailblazers for example. their first summer league game not even regular season or preseason had like 5 million viewers just to see chinese rookie yang hansen play which was more than a lot of playoff games. international viewership is huge in looking at nba audience

37. Because of perpetual little brother energy exemplified in posts like this.

38. NBA sucks now. The last thing I want to watch is a bunch of overpaid players complaining about back to backs while I go to work everyday.

39. Because the NBA showcases individual talent versus a team dynamic. Almost all teen sports are individual driven first, and team second, and the absolutely absurd NBA contracts for their players certainly doesn’t help attraction, but for all of the wrong reasons.

    Plus MLB has poisoned a lot of local markets by their blackout restrictions. Sitting down to watch a baseball game used to be a favorite past time of mine, but it no longer exists for my team.

40. Lol, the Game 7 comparison is hardly an apples to apple. With any sport outside of the NFL, matchups, teams and markets heavily influence the numbers.

    So a WS that has been billed as one of the greatest ever that included the 2nd largest media market vs the Thunder and Pacers is hardly a comparison to hand your New Era on.

41. nobody IRL likes NBA except weird dunces like Blake Snell and people who grew up without fathers. unfortunately there are a lot of of those types nowadays

42. Just look at the social media followers for the NBA vs MLB. Success is defined differently these days for better or worse.