The nail-biting 11-inning matchup where the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run drew a aggregate 51 million spectators across the US, Canadian, and Japan territories. Major League Baseball announced this marks the highest-rated World Series Game 7 after the 1991 showdown featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday memorable contest averaged over 27 million viewers on Fox Sports channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. Per Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the previous week.
It also stands as the top-rated Fall Classic game since the 2017 edition final game between the Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the last Game 7 between the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the weekly rankings, Game 6 placed fourth, Game 4 was 7th, the fifth game came in eighth, and Game 3 finished in 13th place.
Global Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game averaged 11.6M watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports. This was the highest-rated English-language broadcast in Canada since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding game started at 9 p.m. local time, it drew 12M. This followed the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed one run in six frames – drew 13.1M spectators, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-game series averaged 15.71 million viewers on the Fox network, a two percent increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has seen audience increases for two consecutive years.
Counting the Game 1 telecast on the Univision network, the complete US average was 16.1 million. The overall Fall Classic average in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged 8.09 million watchers, an eight percent rise compared to the previous year and Fox’s strongest playoff performance after the 2017 season.
MLB announced that the World Series was broadcast in 203 countries and territories by 44 media partners in sixteen various tongues.
