MW Major League Baseball viewership spiked 21% as four players topped the 50-home-run mark for the first time in decades

By Weston Blasi

Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani are among the four players who hit 50 or more home runs this season

Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees was a key player as baseball enjoyed a fan-interest renewal amid a home-run boom this season.

That famous 1999 Nike commercial asserting that baseball fans dig the longball looks more true now than it has in years.

For the first time since 2001, four Major League Baseball players hit more than 50 home runs in a single season. Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh (60 homers), New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge (52), Los Angeles Dodgers two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani (55) and Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Kyle Schwarber (56) all went deep at least 50 times during the regular season.

And this hasn't just been a win for these sluggers and their teams. The home-run chases among some of the top players in the game may have led to renewed overall interest in the MLB, whose regular season is now over. Now all eyes are on the postseason as the divisional playoff round begins on Saturday.

Speaking of eyes, broadcasters have enjoyed a ratings boost in 2025. ESPN's $(DIS)$ flagship "Sunday Night Baseball" averaged 1.83 million viewers, up 21% from 2024, making it the most-watched season for that program since 2013. This is particularly notable because these increases are among viewers of cable TV - a category that has seen its overall subscriber base drop in recent years as more people cut the cord and switch to streaming. An estimated 86% of U.S. households had cable in 2013, compared with just 35% in 2025.

Similarly, the MLB announced that games on Fox $(FOX)$ averaged 2.04 million viewers for MLB broadcasts this season, which was up 9% from 2024. The MLB Network had a 21% increase in viewership for its broadcasts, and TBS/truTV saw a 29% jump in its audience versus 2024.

What's more, the sought-after young-adult audience (ages 18-34) put up some big baseball-viewership numbers this year, too, for national broadcasts on Fox (+5%), FS1 (+25%), ESPN (+12%), TBS (+74%) and the MLB Network (+19%).

"We did really well with our national partners despite the fact people continue to cut the cord," baseball commissioner Rob Manfred told Sports Business Journal.

The home-run race may have played a part. Thomas Rhoads, a sports-focused economist at Towson University in Maryland, told MarketWatch that the "market seems to be rewarding" the spike in home runs.

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The 2025 season, it should be noted, didn't achieve an overall record for home-run volume, it did see the sixth most home runs in a single season since 1876. MLB-wide totals were at a high in the early 2000s, then dipped in the early 2010s before hitting an all-time-high in 2019, a season prior to the pandemic-abbreviated 2020 season. A full list of home runs by year can be found here.

   Year  MLB home-run total 
   2015  4,909 
   2016  5,610 
   2017  6,105 
   2018  5,585 
   2019  6,776 
   2020  2,303 
   2021  5,940 
   2022  5,215 
   2023  5,868 
   2024  5,453 
   2025  5,650 

So why are long-ball hitters - particularly the select group in the 50-plus club - slugging so many more homers? It may be due to the pace that the balls are coming over the plate.

"Right now, the way the game is going, the pitchers are throwing as hard as they can, and the batters are swinging as hard as they can," Rhoads said. "From the pitcher's perspective, if I can throw 100 miles per hour, I want to blow it by this guy. But these hitters are good - really good - and you can't." And when a bat being swung with great velocity makes square contact with a 100 mph pitch, the likelihood of the ball's leaving the park is elevated.

It's true that fastball pitchers in the MLB are throwing, well, faster. In 2008, the average fastball speed was 91.9 miles per hour, and in 2023 it was 94.2 miles per hour, per Baseball America. That increase, Rhoads said, is part of the reason the top sluggers are sending more pitches out of the ballpark.

Baseball America has conducted several studies whose results indicate that the exit velocity - the speed at which batters hit a ball into play - has been, among top power hitters, on the rise in tandem with the increase in average fastball speed.

Rhoads said he expects home-run trends among the most prolific big-league sluggers to continue - unless pitchers can adjust with off-speed pitches that keep hitters guessing (and deprive them of one contributing factor to exit velocity). Plus, barring major renovation work, the fences at ballparks are at fixed distances from home plate and can't be easily altered to increase the degree of home-run difficulty.

"Like with golf, when Tiger Woods came on to the scene and he was blasting the ball superfar, they moved the tees back - OK, fine," Rhoads said. "You can't change the size of baseball stadiums. I don't see that changing, so the pitchers have to change."

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In addition to TV audience-growth, more fans turned out at stadiums this regular season, too.

MLB drew 71,409,421 fans to regular season games across all teams this year, which was up from last year's 71.348 million. The last time the MLB as a whole hit the 70 million attendance mark for three straight years was nearly a decade ago. What's more, three of the four teams with players who hit more than 50 home runs this season saw attendance gains from 2024. And these attendance figures are particularly strong benchmarks because two teams (the Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays) relocated temporarily to minor-league ballparks.

Major League Baseball has leveraged this season's jump in fan interest to ink new TV deals, one of which unsurprisingly is solely about home runs.

The MLB and Netflix $(NFLX)$ will have exclusive streaming coverage of 2026's opening-night matchup between the Yankees and the San Francisco Giants as part of a three-year deal, per the Athletic. Netflix also negotiated streaming rights to the All-Star break's popular Home Run Derby, an event in which the league's top sluggers compete to hit the most home runs in the manner of a batting-practice session.

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-Weston Blasi

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 04, 2025 09:56 ET (13:56 GMT)

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