Even with baseball back, SmackDown’s numbers climb on July 24

When the delayed start of the Major League Baseball season drew more than 4 million viewers on Thursday night, there may have been some anxiety at Titan Towers about what they could mean for SmackDown when it faced a full slate of games on Friday.

Save that nervous energy for the return of the NBA next week, because the Blue Show had its biggest audience in a month, drawing an average of 1.97 million viewers over its two hour runtime.

In the ratings, it won the 18 - 49 year old demographic outright and shared first place among 18 - 34 year olds a home video show on CBS.

All in all, it was good news across the board for WWE & Fox.

Here are the fast nationals for the broadcast networks:

Showbuzz Daily

Here’s our running tracker of every other episode since WWE moved to Fridays last fall (all data via Showbuzz Daily):

Can they keep the momentum Celtics/Bucks and Mavs/Rockets next Friday? They’ve got two title matches lined up for the attempt.

We shall see.

For complete results and the live blog for SmackDown this week click here. To read a complete recap & review of all the night’s events click here. For a full playlist of the show click here.