The nail-biting 11-inning matchup where the Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run attracted a aggregate over 50 million watchers in the United States, Canadian, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball reported this represents the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 showdown featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
Last Saturday’s epic game drew 27.33 million viewers on Fox Sports networks, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the previous week.
It also is the most-watched Fall Classic matchup after the 2017 edition Game 7 between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged over 29 million. This represents a 16% improvement compared to the last finale between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game placed fourth, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in eighth, and the third game landed in 13th position.
International Audience Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game recorded 11.6 million watchers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports. This was the most-watched English program in the country since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding contest started at 9 PM in the local time zone, it drew 12 million. This followed the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – recorded 13.1 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a single network in the country.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-game series drew over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a two percent increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This represents the first time since 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has seen viewership increases for two consecutive years.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on the Univision network, the complete US viewership reached over 16 million. The total Fall Classic viewership in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels drew 8.09 million watchers, an 8% rise compared to last year and the network’s best playoff performance since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball stated that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in 16 different tongues.
