The nail-biting extra-inning matchup that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Blue Jays 5-4 averaged a aggregate 51 million viewers in the US, Canada, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball reported this marks the most-watched Fall Classic finale after the 1991 showdown featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Viewership Breakdown
The Saturday epic contest averaged 27.33 million audience members on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and Fox’s streaming platforms. According to ratings data, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the week.
It additionally is the most-watched Fall Classic matchup after the 2017 edition final game involving the Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This represents a 16% increase compared to the last finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked fourth, the fourth game ranked seventh, the fifth game was eighth, and Game 3 finished in thirteenth position.
International Audience Numbers
In Canada, the game recorded 11.6 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This was the highest-rated English-language program in the country after the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding game started at 9 PM local time, it averaged 12 million. This came after the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which World Series MVP Yamamoto gave up one run in six innings – recorded over 13 million spectators, making it the highest-rated World Series matchup on a sole broadcaster in Japan.
Series Totals and Patterns
The full seven-game series averaged 15.71M viewers on the Fox network, a 2% increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has seen audience increases for two straight years.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the total US viewership reached 16.1 million. The total World Series average in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1M in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox and its sister channels drew 8.09M watchers, an eight percent increase over the previous year and Fox’s strongest playoff performance since 2017.
Major League Baseball stated that the Fall Classic was televised in over 200 countries and territories by 44 media partners in sixteen various languages.
