The thrilling 11-inning contest where the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Blue Jays by one run attracted a aggregate over 50 million viewers across the US, Canadian, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball announced this represents the highest-rated World Series finale after the 1991 showdown between the Twins and Braves.
Broadcast Viewership Details
The Saturday epic contest secured 27.33M audience members on Fox Sports networks, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s streaming platforms. According to ratings data, it was the second highest-rated program of the previous week.
It also is the top-rated World Series game after the 2017 edition Game 7 involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This marks a sixteen percent increase over the previous finale featuring the Nationals and Houston Astros, which drew 23.19 million.
In the weekly rankings, Game 6 placed fourth, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in 8th, and the third game landed in 13th place.
Global Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game drew 11.6 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 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding contest started at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it drew 12M. This followed last Friday’s Game 6 – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six frames – averaged 13.1M viewers, making it the most-watched Fall Classic matchup on a single network in the country.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The full seven-game series recorded 15.71 million audience members on Fox, a two percent rise from the previous year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This represents the first time after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded audience growth for two consecutive years.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the complete US viewership reached 16.1 million. The overall World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox and its sister channels averaged 8.09 million viewers, an 8% rise over the previous year and Fox’s strongest playoff ratings since 2017.
MLB reported that the World Series was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in 16 different tongues.
