Detroit Tigers: The Ratings Show It. Viewership is up

Forbes released an article discussing MLB’s local tv and streaming viewership is up over 4% for 2020. Detroit Tigers baseball faired very well according to the data.

We were all missing baseball as the pandemic started. The rumors the season was going to be canceled were in the air.  The fans showed how much they missed the Detroit Tigers on TV that the number increase from last year was quite the leap.

According to the data in the Forbes article that dropped last night, The Detroit Tigers had the 6th most increase in change from last year in viewership, from 68,964 to 90,098, an increase of 31% from last year. The data comes from Home Team Sports and includes the newest changes from Nielsen on how viewership is measured.

In 2020, Nielsen was able to track not only TV viewership but digital streams like watching the game from any streaming device. 25 teams are part of the paid service that tracks both so there were a few teams highlighted that their numbers were not a true reflection of viewership. The Chicago White Sox presented the biggest gain, at 136%.

A number that stood out to me in terms of growth was in age demos. With MLB doing a better job (more or less) of making the games easier to stream, the 18-to-34 age group saw an increase of 53% from last year, and the 18-to-49 group grew 31%. So the premise of working the game to a younger audience seems to be working. Worth noting that the 25-to-54 group also saw growth, over 16%.

Overall, as a sport, baseball is trending well for viewership. So the noise you may hear on social media that the games are too long maybe just nonsense. The two questions I am curious to see an answer for while polling the audience for Nielsen would be the following.

1. Did you like the 7 inning games?
2. Did you like the runner starting on second?

In total, 26 million people as the article indicated, watched the game on television or streamed it. However fans feel about the tv broadcasting crew, it did not matter. Being in the hunt for a playoff berth combined with the call ups of Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal played the role in helping Tigers fans stayed glued to their device.

For Detroit Tigers fans, tell us, how did you watch the game this season? What did you think of the changes to the game? Did that affect how you viewed the game?   Let us know in the comment sections on our social media page.