The nail-biting extended clash where the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run attracted a aggregate 51 million watchers in the United States, Canadian, and Japan territories. MLB announced this is the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Viewership Details
The Saturday epic game averaged over 27 million viewers on Fox channels, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the week.
It additionally stands as the most-watched World Series game after the 2017 final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This represents a sixteen percent improvement compared to the previous finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 ranked 4th, the fourth game was seventh, the fifth game came in 8th, and the third game finished in thirteenth place.
Global Viewership Numbers
In Canada, the climactic game recorded 11.6 million watchers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English-language program in the country after the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding contest started at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it averaged 12 million. This came after the previous Friday’s Game 6 – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up one run in six innings – recorded 13.1 million spectators, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic matchup on a sole broadcaster in Japan.
Overall Totals and Trends
The full seven-game series recorded over 15.7 million audience members on Fox, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This represents the first time after 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has seen audience increases for two consecutive years.
Counting the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the total US viewership was over 16 million. The total World Series average in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1M in Canada.
The complete MLB Postseason on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged 8.09 million viewers, an 8% increase compared to the previous year and Fox’s best postseason ratings since 2017.
Major League Baseball reported that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in sixteen different tongues.
