The thrilling extended clash where the Los Angeles Dodgers overcome the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a total 51M spectators in the United States, Canada, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball reported this marks the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 after the 1991 contest featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Details
Last Saturday’s epic contest averaged over 27 million audience members on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the week.
It also stands as the top-rated World Series matchup after the 2017 final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This marks a 16% increase over the last Game 7 between the Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game placed 4th, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in eighth, and Game 3 finished in 13th position.
International Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the climactic game recorded 11.6 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English-language broadcast in Canada since the 2010 edition Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game began at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it attracted 12 million viewers. This came after last Friday’s Game 6 – where Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – recorded over 13 million spectators, making it the highest-rated World Series matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Totals and Trends
The full seven-game series recorded 15.71 million audience members on Fox, a 2% rise from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded viewership increases for two straight years.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete US average was over 16 million. The overall World Series viewership in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels recorded 8.09M watchers, an 8% increase compared to the previous year and the network’s strongest postseason performance after 2017.
MLB announced that the World Series was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by 44 media partners in sixteen different tongues.
