Sports fans are starving for the major American team sports to come back and if you are in the broadcasting business, that is a good thing. With the restart of Major League Baseball on the horizon, FOX’s Mike Mulvihill is expecting that hunger to result in fans devouring live games.
The network’s Executive VP of Research, League Operations & Strategy spoke to play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt in a video produced by FOX Sports. He says that he is expecting the league’s opening weekend to draw 40% more fans in 2020 than what it has recently averaged. That would translate to roughly a million more pairs of eyes on FOX’s baseball coverage.
Mulvihill arrives at that number by taking into account the audience growth for other sports’ restarts. Citing the NFL Draft, NASCAR, and the PGA Tour, he says “Everything’s falling in about that 40-50% range, at least among major sports properties. That gives us a reasonable range of expectation for opening weekend.”
Mulvihill also says that there is plenty of event programming in the condensed 2020 Major League Baseball schedule. He points to the Field of Dreams Game between the Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Cardinals as having potential to be FOX’s “most-watched regular-season game in several seasons,” and notes that with division only play, networks will benefit from the Yankees and Red Sox playing each other for a quarter of their regular season schedules.
