The nail-biting extended matchup that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 attracted a aggregate 51M watchers across the United States, Canadian, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball announced this is the highest-rated World Series finale after the 1991 showdown featuring the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday memorable game secured 27.33 million viewers on Fox channels, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the previous week.
It additionally is the top-rated Fall Classic matchup after the 2017 edition Game 7 between the Dodgers and Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This represents a 16% improvement over the last finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game ranked fourth, Game 4 was 7th, Game 5 was 8th, and Game 3 landed in 13th position.
Global Viewership Figures
In the Canadian market, the game averaged 11.6 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This was the most-watched English program in the country since the 2010 edition Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding game started at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it drew 12 million. This came after last Friday’s Game 6 – where World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – drew 13.1M viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-match World Series drew 15.71M viewers on Fox, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers versus Yankees matchup. This marks the first time since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has seen audience increases for two straight seasons.
Including the opening game telecast on the Univision network, the complete US average was 16.1 million. The overall World Series viewership in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The complete playoffs on Fox and its sister channels averaged 8.09M watchers, an eight percent rise compared to last year and Fox’s best playoff performance after the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the Fall Classic was televised in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four media partners in sixteen various tongues.
