The nail-biting extended contest that saw the Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays by one run attracted a aggregate 51 million spectators across the US, Canada, and Japan markets. Major League Baseball reported this is the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 after the 1991 showdown between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
The Saturday memorable game secured 27.33 million audience members on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second most-watched program of the week.
It additionally stands as the most-watched World Series matchup after the 2017 edition final game between the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This marks a 16% improvement over the previous Game 7 featuring the Nationals and Astros, which drew 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 placed fourth, the fourth game ranked seventh, the fifth game came in eighth, and Game 3 landed in 13th place.
International Viewership Figures
In Canada, the climactic game recorded 11.6 million viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This was the most-watched English-language broadcast in the country since the 2010 edition Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding contest started at 9 p.m. local time, it averaged 12 million viewers. This followed last Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yamamoto allowed a single run in six frames – averaged over 13 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series matchup on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-game series averaged 15.71M viewers on Fox, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This marks the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has seen viewership increases for two consecutive years.
Including the opening game broadcast on the Univision network, the complete US viewership was 16.1M. The overall Fall Classic average in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The complete MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels averaged 8.09 million viewers, an 8% rise over last year and Fox’s strongest playoff performance since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the World Series was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen various tongues.
