The nail-biting 11-inning contest that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a aggregate over 50 million spectators in the United States, Canada, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball announced this is the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 contest between the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
The Saturday epic game secured over 27 million viewers on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and Fox’s digital services. Per Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the previous week.
It additionally is the most-watched World Series matchup after the 2017 edition final game involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This marks a sixteen percent improvement compared to the previous Game 7 between the Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19 million.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game placed 4th, the fourth game ranked 7th, Game 5 came in 8th, and the third game landed in 13th place.
International Audience Figures
In the Canadian market, the climactic game recorded 11.6 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports. This made it the most-watched English-language broadcast in the country since the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding contest began at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it attracted 12 million viewers. This came after the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up one run in six innings – drew 13.1M viewers, making it the most-watched Fall Classic matchup on a single network in Japan.
Overall Averages and Patterns
The full seven-game World Series recorded 15.71M viewers on the Fox network, a two percent rise from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This marks the first time since 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has recorded audience increases for two consecutive years.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete American viewership reached over 16 million. The total 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 drew 8.09 million viewers, an 8% rise over the previous year and the network’s strongest postseason ratings after 2017.
MLB announced that the World Series was broadcast in 203 nations and regions by 44 media partners in sixteen various tongues.
