The nail-biting extended contest that saw the Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run averaged a combined 51M viewers in the United States, Canada, and Japanese markets. MLB stated this marks the highest-rated World Series Game 7 after the 1991 edition contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
Last Saturday’s epic game averaged 27.33 million viewers on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and Fox’s digital services. Per ratings data, it was the second most-watched program of the week.
It additionally is the most-watched Fall Classic game after the 2017 edition Game 7 involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This represents a 16% improvement compared to the last finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 placed fourth, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in 8th, and the third game finished in thirteenth place.
International Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game recorded 11.6 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports. This was the most-watched English-language broadcast in the country since the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the final contest began at 9 PM in the local time zone, it drew 12M. This followed the previous Friday’s Game 6 – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up one run in six innings – averaged over 13 million spectators, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic game on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-game World Series recorded 15.71 million viewers on the Fox network, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has seen viewership growth for two straight years.
Counting the Game 1 telecast on the Univision network, the total US average was over 16 million. The overall World Series viewership in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels averaged 8.09 million viewers, an 8% rise compared to the previous year and Fox’s strongest postseason performance since 2017.
MLB stated that the World Series was televised in 203 countries and territories by forty-four media partners in sixteen various languages.
