Baseball’s All-Star Game, which happened last night, isn’t the big draw it once was. But it’s still a big deal.
Within the last half-century, the audience for the All-Star Game peaked at 36.3 million when ABC aired it back in 1976. The Cincinnati Reds’ “Big Red Machine” had five players named to the starting roster and seven in the game overall as the National League pummeled the American League 7-1. Just last year, however, that All-Star audience dropped to 10.9 million on Fox, tying an all-time low.
That said, it’s still a bigger crowd than the 8 million the National Football League drew for its Pro Bowl on ESPN earlier this year. It’s also better than the 7.6 million viewers the NBA managed for its All-Star game on TNT in February. At this point, it goes without saying that any of those three All-Star games blew out the 1.6 million audience for the National Hockey League All-Star game, which was also played in February.
It’s why, despite World Series viewership numbers that have drifted below 15 million per game — or less than the average for the NBA Finals — fans and networks keep shelling out for Major League Baseball games. In 2012, ESPN agreed to pay the MLB $700 million a year for eight years for both broadcast and digital rights to game broadcasts and for the right to broadcast one wild card game each year. That same year, Turner agreed to pay $300 million each season through 2012 in exchange for better playoff access. Fox, however, entered an eight-year deal that pays Major League Baseball $500 million per year for rights to regular season games, playoff games, the World Series and, perhaps most importantly, the All-Star Game.
