Baseball viewership is booming, per a news release Major League Baseball issued Monday.

The league’s three national TV partners all showed year-over-year increases during the 2025 regular season, which wrapped over the weekend. Sunday Night Baseball, a staple of ESPN’s MLB coverage for nearly four decades that is slated to move to NBC next season, was up 21 percent with an average viewing audience of 1.8 million fans. That’s the best Sunday Night Baseball has drawn since 2012.

Fox, meanwhile, was up nine percent with a 2.04 million average. TBS had a 29 percent increase with an average of 462,000 viewers.

Nielsen, which tracks television ratings, changed its methodology for tracking viewership in September, and the change has been expected to show higher sports numbers across the board. Nielsen is widening where it gets its information to include more modern devices.

MLB attributed the boost in eyeballs to a combination of its stars and its revamped playing rules. This was the third season a pitch clock has been used in the big leagues, and it produced an average game time of two hours, 38 minutes. The average time has now been below two hours, 40 minutes for three straight years, a stretch the sport hasn’t seen since 1983-85. Only three nine-inning games lasted longer than three hours, 30 minutes this year, compared to 391 such games in 2021.

Sports are often star-driven, and baseball has a strong group at the moment. Shohei Ohtani hit 50 home runs again, Aaron Judge won his first American League batting title and Cal Raleigh hit 49 of his 60 home runs as a catcher, breaking the record for long balls at the position. Paul Skenes’ 1.97 ERA made him the first pitcher since Dwight Gooden in 1985 to finish with an ERA below 2.00 in his age-23 season.

Seven players hit both 30 home runs and stole 30 bases, the most ever in a single season: Corbin Carroll, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Francisco Lindor, José Ramírez, Juan Soto, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Julio Rodríguez.

The more balanced schedule that MLB adopted starting in 2022, which guarantees every team plays every other team in a given season, might be a contributor as well. Big-market brawls between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees now happen yearly.

Not everything is rosy: the Cleveland Guardians have an ongoing gambling scandal, while MLB fans are having trouble with ticketing scams lately. A special league event held at a racetrack, the Major League Baseball Speedway Classic, had major operational issues. Many in the industry are also concerned another lockout looms about a year from now, and the lead-up hasn’t been pretty. 

The league said attendance grew for a third straight season, to 71,409,421. The attendance figures that MLB and other sports leagues publicize typically represent the number of tickets teams sell, not the number of people who actually show up to games. The last time MLB’s attendance grew three years in a row was nearly two decades ago, from 2005-07.

(Photo: Matt Dirksen / Chicago Cubs / Getty Images)