The nail-biting extra-inning matchup where the Dodgers beat the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a combined over 50 million watchers in the United States, Canadian, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball announced this marks the highest-rated Fall Classic finale since the 1991 contest between the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday memorable game drew 27.33 million audience members on Fox networks, Fox Deportes and Fox’s digital services. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the week.
It additionally stands as the most-watched Fall Classic matchup since the 2017 edition Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07M. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the previous finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the weekly rankings, Game 6 ranked fourth, Game 4 ranked 7th, Game 5 was eighth, and Game 3 finished in 13th place.
International Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game drew over 11 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English-language broadcast in Canada since the 2010 edition Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game began at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it drew 12 million. This came after the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – recorded 13.1 million spectators, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic game on a single network in the country.
Overall Totals and Trends
The entire seven-match series averaged over 15.7 million viewers on the Fox network, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This marks the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded audience increases for two consecutive years.
Counting the opening game broadcast on Univision, the complete American viewership was 16.1 million. The total Fall Classic viewership in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels recorded 8.09 million watchers, an 8% increase over last year and the network’s strongest postseason ratings after 2017.
MLB reported that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in 16 different tongues.
