The nail-biting 11-inning contest where the Los Angeles Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 averaged a aggregate over 50 million viewers across the United States, Canadian, and Japan markets. Major League Baseball announced this is the most-watched Fall Classic Game 7 since the 1991 showdown featuring the Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Breakdown
Last Saturday’s epic game secured over 27 million viewers on Fox networks, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched program of the previous week.
It also stands as the top-rated Fall Classic game since the 2017 Game 7 between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which drew 29.07 million. This represents a 16% increase compared to the previous Game 7 featuring the Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 placed 4th, Game 4 ranked 7th, the fifth game came in eighth, and the third game finished in thirteenth place.
Global Audience Figures
In Canada, the game averaged 11.6M viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French TVA Sports channel. This was the highest-rated English broadcast in Canada since the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game started at 9 p.m. in the local time zone, it averaged 12 million. This came after the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – drew over 13 million spectators, making it the most-watched Fall Classic matchup on a sole broadcaster in the country.
Series Averages and Patterns
The entire seven-game series recorded 15.71 million audience members on Fox, a two percent increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and ‘16 that the Fall Classic has recorded audience growth for two consecutive years.
Counting the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the complete US viewership was 16.1M. The total Fall Classic average in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox and its sister channels averaged 8.09M viewers, an 8% increase compared to the previous year and the network’s strongest postseason performance after the 2017 season.
MLB announced that the Fall Classic was televised in 203 nations and regions by forty-four media partners in sixteen various languages.
