The thrilling extra-inning matchup that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run attracted a total over 50 million viewers in the US, Canada, and Japan territories. MLB announced this marks the most-watched Fall Classic finale after the 1991 contest featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic game drew 27.33 million viewers on Fox Sports channels, its Spanish-language channel and their digital services. According to ratings data, it was the second most-watched program of the week.
It additionally is the most-watched World Series game since the 2017 edition final game involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This marks a sixteen percent increase over the last finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game ranked fourth, Game 4 ranked 7th, the fifth game came in 8th, and Game 3 landed in 13th place.
International Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game recorded 11.6M viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports channel. This made it the highest-rated English broadcast in the country since the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding contest began at 9 PM local time, it attracted 12 million viewers. This came after last Friday’s Game 6 – in which World Series Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six frames – averaged 13.1M spectators, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Averages and Trends
The entire seven-game series averaged over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has seen audience growth for two consecutive seasons.
Counting the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the complete American viewership was over 16 million. The overall World Series average in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in Canada.
The complete MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels drew over 8 million viewers, an eight percent rise over the previous year and the network’s strongest postseason performance since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball stated that the Fall Classic was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by 44 media partners in sixteen various languages.
