The nail-biting extended contest that saw the Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a combined over 50 million spectators across the US, Canadian, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball announced this is the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 edition showdown featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Details
The Saturday epic game drew 27.33 million audience members on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the week.
It additionally stands as the top-rated World Series game since the 2017 edition final game between the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This represents a sixteen percent improvement compared to the previous finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which drew 23.19 million viewers.
In the weekly rankings, Game 6 ranked fourth, Game 4 was seventh, the fifth game was 8th, and Game 3 landed in 13th position.
Global Audience Figures
In Canada, the game averaged 11.6M viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports. This was the highest-rated English-language program in the country after the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final contest began at 9 p.m. local time, it attracted 12 million viewers. This came after last Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – averaged 13.1 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The full seven-match World Series recorded over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This marks the first time since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded viewership growth for two consecutive seasons.
Counting the Game 1 telecast on the Univision network, the complete US average was 16.1 million. The total World Series average in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The complete playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 drew 8.09M watchers, an eight percent increase over last year and Fox’s best playoff ratings after the 2017 season.
MLB stated that the World Series was televised in over 200 countries and territories by 44 broadcasting partners in sixteen different tongues.
