The nail-biting 11-inning clash that saw the Dodgers beat the Blue Jays 5-4 averaged a total over 50 million viewers across the United States, Canada, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball stated this marks the most-watched Fall Classic finale after the 1991 showdown featuring the Twins and Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic contest averaged 27.33M viewers on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the previous week.
It additionally stands as the most-watched Fall Classic matchup since the 2017 Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This represents a sixteen percent improvement over the previous finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 placed 4th, the fourth game ranked seventh, Game 5 came in 8th, and the third game finished in 13th position.
Global Audience Figures
In the Canadian market, the climactic game averaged 11.6M viewers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports. This made it the highest-rated English-language broadcast in the country since the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding contest began at 9 PM local time, it averaged 12 million. This followed the previous Friday’s sixth game – where Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed one run in six innings – recorded 13.1M spectators, making it the most-watched Fall Classic matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Overall Totals and Trends
The entire seven-match World Series averaged 15.71 million audience members on the Fox network, a two percent rise from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded viewership growth for two consecutive seasons.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the complete American viewership was 16.1M. The total World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The complete MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels recorded over 8 million watchers, an eight percent rise over the previous year and Fox’s best postseason ratings since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball stated that the World Series was broadcast in 203 countries and territories by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different tongues.
