The nail-biting extended clash that saw the Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a total 51M viewers across the United States, Canada, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball stated this represents the most-watched World Series Game 7 after the 1991 contest between the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic game secured 27.33 million viewers on Fox channels, Fox Deportes and Fox’s streaming platforms. Per ratings data, it was the second highest-rated program of the week.
It additionally is the most-watched World Series game since the 2017 Game 7 between the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the last finale between the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked fourth, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in 8th, and the third game landed in thirteenth position.
International Audience Numbers
In the Canadian market, the climactic game drew 11.6 million viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports. This made it the most-watched English broadcast in the country since the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game started 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 frames – drew over 13 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series matchup on a single network in the country.
Series Averages and Patterns
The entire seven-game World Series drew 15.71 million viewers on Fox, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the first time after 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has recorded viewership increases for two straight years.
Counting the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the total 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 full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 drew 8.09M watchers, an eight percent rise compared to last year and the network’s best postseason ratings after the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different languages.
