The nail-biting 11-inning contest where the Los Angeles Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 attracted a aggregate 51 million viewers in the US, Canada, and Japanese markets. MLB announced this marks the highest-rated World Series finale since the 1991 edition contest between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Details
Last Saturday’s memorable 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 program of the week.
It also is the most-watched World Series game after the 2017 edition final game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07M. This represents a sixteen percent increase compared to the last Game 7 featuring the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked fourth, Game 4 was 7th, the fifth game came in eighth, and the third game finished in 13th position.
Global Viewership Figures
In the Canadian market, the climactic game averaged 11.6M viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports. This made it the most-watched English-language program in the country after the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game started at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it attracted 12 million. This followed last Friday’s sixth game – where World Series Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – recorded 13.1 million spectators, making it the highest-rated World Series matchup on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-game World Series recorded over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has recorded audience increases for two consecutive seasons.
Counting the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete US average was 16.1 million. The total World Series average in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The complete MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels averaged 8.09M viewers, an 8% increase over the previous year and Fox’s strongest playoff performance since 2017.
MLB stated that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in sixteen different tongues.
