The American League Wild Card Game on Tuesday night was everything Major League Baseball could have asked for.
The Boston Red Sox hosted their rival New York Yankees, and while the crowd at Fenway Park gave a noticeable boost to the home team, fans at home kept that same energy.
For all the Red Sox-Yankees games ESPN has had rights to over the years, this one garnered the most viewership in some time.
ESPN’s telecasts of the Wild Card Game drew the biggest audience the network has seen for baseball since 1998, with an average 7.7 million viewers across ESPN and ESPN2 that peaked at 8.4 million viewers.
In Boston, the game received a 19.8 rating — the highest for a Red Sox game on ESPN since 2009. It delivered an 11.2 rating in New York, accounting for ESPN’s biggest Yankees game since 2017.
Red Sox-Yankees had viewership up 67% from the Tampa Bay Rays-Oakland Athletics AL Wild Card in 2019. So, let’s do these two markets again next year?
