The nail-biting 11-inning matchup that saw the Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a total over 50 million watchers across the United States, Canadian, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball announced this marks the highest-rated Fall Classic finale since the 1991 edition showdown featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Details
Last Saturday’s memorable contest secured 27.33 million viewers on Fox Sports networks, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the week.
It also is the most-watched World Series game after the 2017 Game 7 between the Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the last Game 7 between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which drew 23.19 million.
In the weekly rankings, Game 6 placed 4th, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in eighth, and Game 3 landed in 13th position.
International Audience Figures
In Canada, the climactic game averaged 11.6M watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports. This made it the most-watched English program in Canada since the 2010 edition Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game started at 9 PM local time, it averaged 12M. This came after the previous Friday’s Game 6 – where Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yamamoto allowed one run in six innings – recorded over 13 million viewers, making it the most-watched Fall Classic matchup on a single network in the country.
Series Averages and Patterns
The full seven-game series recorded over 15.7 million audience members on Fox, a 2% rise from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the initial instance since 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has seen audience growth for two consecutive seasons.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete American viewership was 16.1 million. The total Fall Classic viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged 8.09 million viewers, an eight percent rise over last year and the network’s best postseason performance since 2017.
Major League Baseball announced that the World Series was televised in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different languages.
