The nail-biting 11-inning matchup where the Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run attracted a combined 51M viewers across the US, Canada, and Japan markets. Major League Baseball announced this is the most-watched World Series finale after the 1991 contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Viewership Breakdown
The Saturday epic game secured 27.33M audience members on Fox networks, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. Per Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the previous week.
It also is the most-watched World Series matchup since the 2017 final game involving the Dodgers and Astros, which drew over 29 million. This marks a 16% improvement over the previous finale between the Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game placed fourth, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in 8th, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth position.
International Viewership Figures
In the Canadian market, the game recorded 11.6 million watchers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This was the highest-rated English broadcast in Canada since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final contest began at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it drew 12 million. This followed the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – recorded 13.1M spectators, making it the most-watched World Series game on a sole broadcaster in Japan.
Overall Averages and Patterns
The full seven-match series averaged over 15.7 million audience members on the Fox network, a two percent increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has seen audience growth for two consecutive seasons.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete US viewership was 16.1M. The overall Fall Classic viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged 8.09M watchers, an eight percent rise compared to last year and the network’s strongest postseason performance since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the World Series was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in sixteen various tongues.
