Will Baseball's Playoffs Give Fox Sports 1 a Win?

When 21st Century Fox announced Fox Sports 1, a 24-hour cable sports network, in March 2013, it wasn’t shy about its ambition: to go one-on-one with Walt Disney’s ESPN. “We’re coming in trying to take on the establishment,” Bill Wanger, Fox Sports Media Group’s executive vice president for programming, said then at a news conference. “It’s no different than Fox News or Fox Broadcasting back in the ’80s. We’re going to have to scratch and claw our way all the way to the top.”

This fall, with a push from Major League Baseball’s playoffs, the upstart network offered its strongest challenge yet. According to Nielsen data provided by Horizon Media, Game 2 of the National League Championship Series between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals on Oct. 12 drew an average 4.4 million viewers, the largest audience for Fox Sports 1 since its debut in August 2013. Fox had negotiated the right to put some playoff games on its yet-to-launch cable network when it signed an eight-year TV deal with MLB in 2012. That foresight is now paying dividends. Through Oct. 12, playoff games have notched six of Fox Sports 1’s 10 most-watched shows and topped all of cable in prime-time ratings three times, surpassing even ESPN. “We always knew that postseason baseball and the whole month of October was going to be big for the network,” says David Nathanson, general manager and chief operating officer of Fox Sports 1. “We’re very pleased with where we are right now.”