Major League Baseball All-Star is basically a week of tentpoles, and the league’s broadcast partners and brands are cramming more into the tent than ever.
Earlier this week, Fox announced to Variety that it had sold out its ad inventory of roughly 80 commercials for the 2025 MLB All-Star Game in June—nearly a month earlier than usual, and for a reported $750,000 to $850,000 per 30 seconds. What Fox Sports evp of ad sales Mark Evans didn’t mention, but told ADWEEK later, was that demand for this year’s All-Star Game on July 15 surfaced as early as Fox’s 2024 sports-heavy upfront. Did it help MLB All-Star ad presales in January and February to surround MLB announcers Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez with pitches for Super Bowl 59 and the 2026 World Cup a few months earlier?
“Yeah, I think it did: I think marketers in general are now recognizing that there are fewer and fewer places to aggregate scale quickly,” Evans told ADWEEK. “There just aren’t that many seminal events that bring so many millions of Americans together at the same time, and live sports leads that charge…[but] if marketers don’t place that bet early, the pricing only escalates, and then eventually we sell out and they can’t get in at all.”
Last year, the All-Star Game drew 7.6 million viewers across Fox channels—up 6% from a year earlier, but down from 8 million before the pandemic and 10 million a decade ago. That said, it still drew more viewers than the NFL Pro Bowl Games (5.79 million), NBA All-Star Game (5.4 million in 2024), WNBA All-Star (3.4 million), and NHL All-Star (1.4 million). Even the Home Run Derby averaged 5.45 million viewers for ESPN in 2024 during what was considered a lull for an event that drew 7 million viewers as recently as 2021 and 8 million in 2017.
