The nail-biting extended contest that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays by one run drew a combined over 50 million spectators in the United States, Canada, and Japan markets. Major League Baseball stated this marks the most-watched Fall Classic Game 7 after the 1991 contest featuring the Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic contest drew 27.33M audience members on Fox Sports channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the previous week.
It also is the top-rated World Series game after the 2017 edition Game 7 involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the previous finale between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which drew 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked fourth, the fourth game ranked 7th, Game 5 came in eighth, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth place.
International Audience Figures
In Canada, the climactic game recorded 11.6M watchers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports. This made it the highest-rated English broadcast in the country since the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game started at 9 PM local time, it averaged 12 million viewers. This came after the previous Friday’s Game 6 – in which World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed one run in six innings – recorded over 13 million viewers, making it the most-watched World Series matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Averages and Trends
The entire seven-game series recorded 15.71 million audience members on the Fox network, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded viewership increases for two consecutive years.
Including the Game 1 telecast on the Univision network, the total American average was 16.1 million. The overall Fall Classic average in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 drew over 8 million viewers, an 8% rise over last year and the network’s strongest playoff performance since the 2017 season.
MLB reported that the Fall Classic was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in 16 various languages.
