The nail-biting extended matchup where the Los Angeles Dodgers overcome the Toronto Blue Jays by one run averaged a combined 51 million watchers across 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 Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic game averaged 27.33 million viewers on Fox Sports channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. Per Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the week.
It additionally stands as the top-rated Fall Classic game after the 2017 final game involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. 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 Nielsen ratings, Game 6 ranked 4th, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 was eighth, and Game 3 finished in 13th place.
International Audience Figures
In the Canadian market, the climactic game averaged over 11 million watchers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English broadcast in the country since the 2010 edition Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding contest started at 9 PM in the local time zone, it drew 12 million. This came after the previous Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yamamoto gave up one run in six innings – averaged 13.1M spectators, making it the most-watched Fall Classic matchup on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The full seven-game series recorded 15.71M viewers on the Fox network, a 2% rise from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This marks the first time after 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded viewership increases for two straight years.
Including the Game 1 telecast on the Univision network, the complete US average reached over 16 million. The overall World Series average in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1M in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged over 8 million watchers, an 8% increase over the previous year and Fox’s best postseason ratings after the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball stated that the Fall Classic was broadcast in 203 countries and territories by 44 media partners in 16 different languages.
