The nail-biting 11-inning clash that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Blue Jays by one run averaged a combined over 50 million viewers across the US, Canada, and Japanese markets. Major League Baseball stated this represents the highest-rated World Series Game 7 since the 1991 showdown between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
Last Saturday’s epic game averaged 27.33M audience members on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and their digital services. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the previous week.
It additionally stands as the top-rated Fall Classic matchup after the 2017 edition final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This represents a sixteen percent increase 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 4th, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in eighth, and Game 3 finished in 13th place.
International Viewership Numbers
In Canada, the game averaged 11.6 million watchers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports. This was the most-watched English broadcast in Canada since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game began at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it attracted 12 million viewers. This followed last Friday’s sixth game – in which World Series Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – drew 13.1 million viewers, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic matchup on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The full seven-game series recorded 15.71 million audience members on the Fox network, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the first time since 2015 and ‘16 that the Fall Classic has seen viewership growth for two straight seasons.
Counting the opening game broadcast on Univision, the complete American viewership reached 16.1 million. The total World Series average in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The complete MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels drew 8.09 million watchers, an eight percent increase compared to the previous year and the network’s strongest playoff performance after the 2017 season.
MLB announced that the World Series was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four media partners in 16 various tongues.
