Opening Night draws huge San Francisco audience for Giants-Dodgers

With no other major American sports going, Major League Baseball found a massive audience Thursday night in its return to play.

The Giants’ 8-1 loss to the Dodgers in the 7 p.m. PT nightcap drew a massive 6.9 rating in San Francisco, the best seen for a regular season MLB game since 2013, according to ESPN. It was also the network’s most watched late-night regular season game ever, with an average audience of 2,764,000. In Los Angeles, it drew a 6.8 rating, the network’s highest-rated regular season game in that market aside from the Dodgers’ 2018 Game 163 vs. the Rockies for the NL West crown.

The astronomical ratings may have been buoyed by a holdover East Coast audience interested in ESPN’s Opening Night matinee game between the Yankees and Nationals, which went into a rain delay in the sixth inning and was later called final at that juncture. ESPN filled about an hour of air time with rain delay coverage before the Giants-Dodgers game began.

That game drew the largest average audience of any Opening Night MLB game ever (4,000,000), and was the most watched regular season game since 2011. ESPN says it was a 232 percent viewership increase over last year’s Red SoxMariners opener.

Johnson’s poor finish was compounded by the fact that other drivers, earlier ranked below him, like Byron, Tyler Reddick and Erik Jones all finished above him Thursday. Jones finished in fifth place, Byron was 10th and Reddick was 15th. After points were awarded, the order now stands with Byron as the 16th driver (452 points), then Reddick below the cutoff (442), followed by Jones (440) and Johnson (434).

“I think there’s been a lot of (those conversations within Team Hendrick) about how we get the speed there,” Byron said earlier in the week about the recent finishing struggles for him and Johnson.

He said the team’s had “some bright spots” and predicted that Kansas and Dover would be in their “wheelhouse” in terms of performance.

Kansas was looking solid for Johnson until the wreck, which also took out Dillon and Matt DiBenedetto. Dillon, however, already secured his way into the postseason with a victory at Texas last Sunday, as did Cup rookie Cole Custer at Kentucky with a surprise win. DiBenedetto had a solid cushion in points before the race through some top-five finishes, so while the crash was frustrating for him, it wasn’t nearly as detrimental as it was for Johnson.

In contrast, the driver who helped himself most at Kansas was Jones, who made a jump from a 24-point deficit from the cutoff to a 12 points behind Byron.

“We started really deep, and just could never quite get up to the front and get clean air,” Jones said on NBCSN after the race, adding that it was a “good” No. 20 Toyota Camry and a “good” effort.

“We just gotta keep doing that and racking these points up and hopefully get a win,” Jones said.

Earlier in the week, Jones said securing points sooner rather than later was a priority with the unpredictable races at the Daytona road course and oval added to the schedule.

While Hamlin and Harvick are becoming names all too common in Victory Lane, based on where drivers on the bubble are running, it’s seems like it’s just a matter of time before any one of those names — Byron, Reddick, Jones or Johnson — snag a win in the next seven races.

Perhaps Johnson’s luck will turn in New Hampshire, and it will be another champion, Busch, holding his breath.