The exciting extended contest that saw the Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 attracted a total 51M watchers in the United States, Canada, and Japan markets. MLB announced this is the most-watched Fall Classic finale after the 1991 contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Details
The Saturday epic game secured 27.33M audience members on Fox Sports networks, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the week.
It additionally is the top-rated Fall Classic matchup after the 2017 final game between the Dodgers and Astros, which drew over 29 million. This represents a sixteen percent increase over the previous Game 7 featuring the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which drew 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked 4th, the fourth game was 7th, the fifth game came in 8th, and Game 3 finished in thirteenth position.
International Audience Figures
In Canada, the climactic game drew over 11 million viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports. This made it the most-watched English broadcast in the country since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the final contest began at 9 PM local time, it averaged 12 million viewers. This came after the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic MVP Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – drew 13.1 million spectators, making it the highest-rated World Series matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Averages and Trends
The full seven-game series averaged over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a two percent increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This represents the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has seen audience growth for two consecutive years.
Counting the opening game broadcast on Univision, the complete US average reached 16.1 million. The overall World Series average in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1M in the Canadian market.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox, FS1 and FS2 drew 8.09M watchers, an eight percent rise compared to last year and the network’s best postseason performance since 2017.
MLB reported that the World Series was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in sixteen various languages.
