The exciting extended contest that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a total 51 million viewers in the United States, Canada, and Japanese markets. Major League Baseball stated this is the highest-rated Fall Classic finale since the 1991 contest featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
The Saturday epic contest secured 27.33 million audience members on Fox Sports networks, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. According to ratings data, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the previous week.
It additionally is the most-watched Fall Classic game since the 2017 Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This represents a sixteen percent improvement compared to the previous Game 7 between the Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 placed 4th, the fourth game ranked 7th, the fifth game came in 8th, and the third game finished in 13th place.
International Viewership Figures
In Canada, the game drew 11.6M watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the highest-rated English broadcast in the country since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final contest started at 9 PM in the local time zone, it averaged 12M. This followed last Friday’s Game 6 – in which World Series Most Valuable Player Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – averaged over 13 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Trends
The full seven-game series recorded 15.71 million audience members on Fox, a two percent increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This represents the first time since 2015 and ‘16 that the Fall Classic has seen viewership increases for two straight years.
Counting the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the total US viewership reached over 16 million. The total World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1M in Canada.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 recorded 8.09M watchers, an eight percent rise over the previous year and Fox’s strongest postseason performance since 2017.
Major League Baseball reported that the World Series was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by 44 broadcasting partners in 16 different tongues.
