The nail-biting 11-inning clash where the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Blue Jays by one run attracted a total 51 million watchers across the United States, Canadian, and Japan territories. MLB announced this is the most-watched Fall Classic finale after the 1991 contest between the Twins and Braves.
Television Viewership Details
Last Saturday’s epic contest secured 27.33M audience members on Fox channels, Fox Deportes and Fox’s streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the week.
It additionally is the top-rated World Series game since the 2017 edition final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07 million. This marks a sixteen percent improvement compared to the last finale between the Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 ranked fourth, the fourth game was seventh, the fifth game came in eighth, and the third game landed in thirteenth place.
Global Audience Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game averaged 11.6 million watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the highest-rated English broadcast in Canada after the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final contest started at 9 p.m. local time, it attracted 12 million viewers. This came after last Friday’s Game 6 – where Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – averaged 13.1 million viewers, making it the most-watched World Series game on a single network in the country.
Series Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-game World Series averaged over 15.7 million audience members on the Fox network, a 2% rise from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This represents the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded viewership increases for two straight seasons.
Counting the opening game telecast on the Univision network, the total American viewership was over 16 million. The total Fall Classic average in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels recorded over 8 million viewers, an eight percent rise over the previous year and the network’s strongest postseason performance after 2017.
MLB reported that the World Series was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by 44 media partners in 16 different tongues.