The exciting extended matchup that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a combined 51M spectators in the United States, Canada, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball stated this represents the most-watched Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 showdown featuring the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Details
The Saturday epic contest averaged 27.33M viewers on Fox networks, its Spanish-language channel and their digital services. According to ratings data, it was the second most-watched program of the week.
It also is the most-watched Fall Classic matchup since the 2017 edition Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This represents a sixteen percent improvement over the last Game 7 featuring the Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19 million.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game placed 4th, the fourth game was seventh, Game 5 was eighth, and Game 3 finished in 13th position.
Global Audience Figures
In Canada, the game averaged 11.6M viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports channel. This was the most-watched English broadcast in the country since the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game began at 9 PM local time, it attracted 12 million. This followed the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – averaged over 13 million spectators, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Trends
The entire seven-game series averaged 15.71 million audience members on Fox, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance after 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has recorded audience increases for two consecutive seasons.
Including the opening game broadcast on Univision, the total US viewership reached 16.1M. The overall World Series average in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in Canada.
The complete playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged over 8 million watchers, an eight percent rise over last year and the network’s strongest playoff performance since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball stated that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in 16 various languages.
