The nail-biting extended matchup where the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run attracted a total 51M watchers in the US, Canada, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball stated this represents the most-watched World Series finale after the 1991 contest featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Viewership Details
The Saturday epic game drew 27.33M audience members on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and Fox’s streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the previous week.
It also is the top-rated World Series matchup since the 2017 final game involving the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which drew 29.07M. This represents a sixteen percent improvement compared to the previous finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million.
In the weekly rankings, Game 6 placed fourth, the fourth game ranked 7th, the fifth game was eighth, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth place.
International Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the climactic game drew over 11 million viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports. This made it the most-watched English program in the country since the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game started at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it averaged 12M. This came after last Friday’s sixth game – where World Series Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – averaged 13.1M viewers, making it the most-watched Fall Classic game on a single network in the country.
Series Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-game series averaged over 15.7 million audience members on the Fox network, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the first time since 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has seen viewership increases for two consecutive years.
Counting the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete American viewership reached over 16 million. The overall World Series average in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1M in Canada.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox, FS1 and FS2 recorded 8.09M watchers, an eight percent increase compared to the previous year and the network’s best playoff performance since 2017.
Major League Baseball announced that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by 44 broadcasting partners in sixteen different tongues.
