The nail-biting extra-inning contest that saw the Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run drew a aggregate 51M watchers in the US, Canada, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball stated this represents the highest-rated World Series finale after the 1991 contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
The Saturday memorable contest secured over 27 million audience members on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and their streaming platforms. According to ratings data, it was the second most-watched program of the previous week.
It additionally is the top-rated World Series matchup since the 2017 final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This represents a 16% improvement compared to the last finale between the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 placed fourth, the fourth game was 7th, Game 5 came in eighth, and the third game landed in thirteenth position.
Global Audience Figures
In Canada, the game averaged over 11 million watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English-language program in the country after the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game started at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it averaged 12M. This followed last Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six frames – recorded over 13 million viewers, making it the most-watched World Series game on a single network in Japan.
Series Averages and Patterns
The full seven-match series averaged over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This represents the first time after 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has recorded viewership growth for two straight seasons.
Including the opening game broadcast on the Univision network, the complete American viewership was over 16 million. The overall World Series viewership in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The complete playoffs on Fox and its sister channels drew 8.09M viewers, an eight percent increase over the previous year and Fox’s strongest postseason ratings after 2017.
Major League Baseball stated that the World Series was televised in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different languages.