The nail-biting 11-inning clash that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a total 51M viewers in the United States, Canadian, and Japanese markets. Major League Baseball stated this marks the highest-rated World Series finale after the 1991 showdown featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
The Saturday epic contest averaged 27.33 million viewers on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. Per ratings data, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the week.
It also stands as the most-watched World Series game since the 2017 edition Game 7 between the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07M. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the previous Game 7 featuring the Nationals and Houston Astros, which drew 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked fourth, Game 4 was 7th, Game 5 was eighth, and the third game finished in 13th place.
International Audience Figures
In Canada, the game drew 11.6 million watchers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English broadcast in Canada after the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the final game started at 9 p.m. local time, it attracted 12 million. This followed last Friday’s Game 6 – in which Fall Classic MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – drew 13.1M spectators, making it the most-watched World Series game on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The full seven-game World Series recorded 15.71 million viewers on Fox, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This represents the initial instance after 2015 and ‘16 that the Fall Classic has seen viewership increases for two straight years.
Including the opening game telecast on Univision, the complete American viewership was 16.1M. The total Fall Classic viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The complete MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels averaged 8.09 million viewers, an 8% increase over last year and the network’s strongest postseason ratings since the 2017 season.
MLB reported that the World Series was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in sixteen various tongues.
