Major League Baseball's Field of Dreams game delivered its best regular season viewership in 16 years, but an NFL exhibition game drew a larger audience

NBC Sports

About 5.9 million watched the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox play in the temporary ballpark in Iowa inspired by the 1989 Kevin Costner film. But as ProFootballTalk's Mike Florio points out, the NFL Hall of Fame game a week earlier, played almost entirely with backups, had 7.3 million viewers. "That’s not a knock on baseball; it’s just a statement of numbers-don’t-lie fact," says Florio. "It was indeed the highest-rated regular-season baseball game in 16 years. But when that new high-water mark still falls 1.4 million viewers behind a football games replete with backups, it demonstrates that, when it comes to football, if you build it, a lot more people will come.