​By all accounts, Major League Baseball should be seeing viewership numbers sliding. With 14 teams now under MLB’s broadcast umbrella, changes that have brought in NBC and Netflix after ESPN opted out of their Sunday Night Baseball package, baseball has never been more fragmented. To add, MLB has had to go up against the FIFA World Cup, which has seen incredible interest. And yet, as the league hits the All-Star break, it is seeing numbers that show the sport is exceptionally healthy.A significant disruptor heading into the season was the continued fallout of Main Street Sports (the prior Diamond Sports Group). The beleaguered owner of nearly half of the league’s regional sports networks had been under the cloud of bankruptcy, and in the offseason, all of the remaining clubs left. As Main Street Sports, which owned the FanDuel family of channels, collapsed under bankruptcy, and the Nats no longer were tied to MASN, the Nationals, Brewers, Cardinals, Marlins, Rays, Reds, Royals, Tigers, and Braves were left to scramble right up to Opening Day. The Seattle Mariners decided to shutter ROOT Sports NW at the end of the 2025 season and joined the fray. When coupled with other clubs leaving in previous seasons, all told MLB now produces 14 teams.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAccording to Nielsen NSI, using TV households as of July 4, 2026, measuring an avg of 2,368 local games, the 14-team collective delivery is presently sitting +4% over the same point in time last season.More broadly, when excluding Canada, which Nielsen does not track, the remaining 29 clubs are situated among 26 markets (two teams each in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago). At the local level, 14 of MLB’s markets (with a tie for first in a 15th market), a club’s primetime game telecasts outperform every station’s primetime daypart average in the market. To add, in 20 of MLB’s 26 markets, a club’s primetime game telecasts outperform every cable network’s primetime daypart average in the market.One sizable difference with the changes are in relationship to viewership on linear television and streaming.According to Nielsen, linear television viewership for the 29 U.S. MLB clubs are down -2% year-over-year. But that is shifting to streaming.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAccording to Playfly, Sports, which handles advertising bundles for the MLB regional sports networks, as well as for clubs that have gone over to MLB, where MLB Network has handled production, for streaming, 27 of their 29 teams that are reporting streaming data, has provided strong growth as a whole, sitting at +24% unique streamers per game, with avg minutes streamed up +43%. Additionally, average minutes per streamer are up +15% growth compared to last year, watching 104.4 minutes per game. To put that into context, that is 2x the average viewing minutes across the national networks (51.9).Large market MLB teams are seeing slight linear audience erosion, but we are still seeing succes