The nail-biting 11-inning clash that saw the Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a total over 50 million spectators in the United States, Canada, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball announced this is the highest-rated World Series Game 7 after the 1991 showdown featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Breakdown
Last Saturday’s epic game drew over 27 million viewers on Fox Sports channels, its Spanish-language channel and their streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the previous week.
It additionally is the top-rated Fall Classic game since the 2017 edition final game involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07M. This represents a 16% improvement compared to the previous finale between the Nationals and Astros, which drew 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 placed fourth, the fourth game ranked 7th, Game 5 came in eighth, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth position.
Global Viewership Figures
In Canada, the climactic game drew 11.6M watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English broadcast in the country since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game started at 9 p.m. local time, it averaged 12 million. This came after last Friday’s Game 6 – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – recorded 13.1 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a single network in the country.
Overall Averages and Patterns
The full seven-game series averaged over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a 2% rise from last year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This represents the initial instance after 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has seen viewership increases for two straight years.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the total American average reached 16.1 million. The total Fall Classic average in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox and its sister channels recorded 8.09 million viewers, an eight percent increase over the previous year and Fox’s strongest playoff performance after the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four media partners in sixteen different tongues.
