The nail-biting 11-inning matchup where the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a combined 51 million viewers in the United States, Canada, and Japanese territories. Major League Baseball stated this marks the most-watched Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 contest between the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Viewership Details
The Saturday epic contest secured 27.33 million audience members on Fox Sports channels, its Spanish-language channel and their digital services. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the week.
It also is the most-watched Fall Classic game since the 2017 edition Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew over 29 million. This represents a 16% increase over the last Game 7 featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which drew 23.19 million.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 ranked 4th, the fourth game was seventh, Game 5 was eighth, and Game 3 finished in thirteenth place.
International Viewership Numbers
In Canada, the game drew 11.6M watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports. This made it the highest-rated English-language program in the country after the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game began at 9 PM local time, it attracted 12M. This came after the previous Friday’s Game 6 – in which World Series Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed a single run in six innings – averaged 13.1 million spectators, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-match series averaged 15.71 million viewers on Fox, a two percent rise from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has recorded audience increases for two consecutive seasons.
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 9.7 million and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 recorded 8.09M viewers, an eight percent rise compared to the previous year and the network’s strongest playoff ratings after 2017.
Major League Baseball stated that the World Series was broadcast in over 200 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in sixteen different languages.
