The nail-biting 11-inning contest where the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a combined over 50 million viewers in the US, Canadian, and Japan territories. MLB reported this is the highest-rated World Series Game 7 after the 1991 contest featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
The Saturday memorable contest drew 27.33M viewers on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and their digital services. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the week.
It also is the top-rated World Series matchup after the 2017 edition final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07 million. This marks a 16% improvement over the previous finale between the Washington Nationals and Astros, which drew 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game placed 4th, Game 4 was seventh, the fifth game came in 8th, and the third game finished in 13th place.
Global Audience Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game drew 11.6 million watchers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports. This was the highest-rated English-language broadcast in the country after the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the final game started at 9 PM in the local time zone, it drew 12 million. This followed last Friday’s sixth game – where Fall Classic MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up one run in six innings – recorded 13.1 million viewers, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic matchup on a single network in Japan.
Series Averages and Patterns
The entire seven-match series averaged 15.71M viewers on Fox, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers versus Yankees matchup. This marks the first time since 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has recorded audience increases for two consecutive years.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete US viewership reached 16.1 million. The overall World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox, FS1 and FS2 recorded over 8 million viewers, an eight percent increase compared to the previous year and the network’s strongest playoff performance since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball stated that the World Series was televised in 203 countries and territories by 44 broadcasting partners in 16 different languages.
