The exciting 11-inning contest that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a combined 51M viewers in the US, Canada, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball stated this marks the most-watched Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 showdown featuring the Twins and Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Breakdown
Last Saturday’s memorable game drew 27.33 million audience members on Fox Sports channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the week.
It additionally is the most-watched World Series game after the 2017 Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the previous finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game ranked 4th, Game 4 was 7th, the fifth game came in 8th, and Game 3 landed in 13th place.
International Audience Numbers
In the Canadian market, the climactic game averaged 11.6M viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This was the highest-rated English-language broadcast in Canada after the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the final game began at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it averaged 12M. This followed last Friday’s Game 6 – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – drew over 13 million viewers, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Averages and Patterns
The full seven-match series averaged 15.71 million viewers on the Fox network, a 2% rise from the previous year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This marks the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has seen viewership growth for two consecutive years.
Including the Game 1 telecast on Univision, the complete American viewership reached 16.1M. The overall World Series viewership in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged 8.09 million watchers, an 8% increase over the previous year and the network’s strongest postseason ratings since the 2017 season.
MLB reported that the Fall Classic was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different tongues.
