The nail-biting 11-inning contest that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a total 51M viewers in the US, Canadian, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball announced this marks the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 showdown between the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Details
The Saturday epic game drew over 27 million audience members on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the week.
It additionally stands as the most-watched World Series matchup since the 2017 edition final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This represents a sixteen percent increase compared to the previous Game 7 featuring the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which drew 23.19M.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game ranked 4th, Game 4 was 7th, Game 5 was 8th, and the third game landed in 13th place.
International Audience Figures
In the Canadian market, the game averaged over 11 million watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports. This was the most-watched English-language broadcast in Canada since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game started at 9 PM local time, it drew 12 million. This followed the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six frames – recorded over 13 million viewers, making it the most-watched World Series game on a single network in Japan.
Series Averages and Patterns
The entire seven-match series recorded over 15.7 million viewers on the Fox network, a 2% increase from the previous year’s Dodgers versus Yankees matchup. This marks the first time after 2015 and ‘16 that the Fall Classic has seen audience growth for two consecutive seasons.
Including the opening game broadcast on the Univision network, the complete US viewership was 16.1 million. The overall World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1M in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox and its sister channels averaged over 8 million watchers, an eight percent increase compared to last year and the network’s best postseason performance since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the World Series was televised in 203 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in 16 different tongues.
