The thrilling 11-inning matchup that saw the Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays by one run drew a total 51 million spectators in the US, Canada, and Japanese markets. Major League Baseball stated this marks the highest-rated Fall Classic finale after the 1991 edition contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic contest averaged over 27 million audience members on Fox Sports networks, Fox Deportes and Fox’s digital services. Per ratings data, it was the second highest-rated broadcast of the previous week.
It additionally stands as the top-rated Fall Classic matchup since the 2017 Game 7 involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07M. This represents a sixteen percent increase over the previous Game 7 between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game ranked 4th, the fourth game was seventh, Game 5 came in eighth, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth place.
International Viewership Figures
In Canada, the climactic game drew 11.6M watchers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the highest-rated English-language program in the country since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the final game began at 9 PM in the local time zone, it drew 12 million viewers. This came after last Friday’s sixth game – where Fall Classic MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed one run in six innings – recorded 13.1 million spectators, making it the highest-rated Fall Classic game on a single network in the country.
Series Totals and Trends
The entire seven-game series recorded over 15.7 million viewers on the Fox network, a 2% increase from the previous year’s Dodgers versus Yankees matchup. This represents the first time after 2015 and ‘16 that the Fall Classic has recorded audience growth for two consecutive seasons.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the total US average reached 16.1 million. The overall World Series average in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1M in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 recorded 8.09 million viewers, an 8% rise over last year and the network’s strongest playoff performance after the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball announced that the Fall Classic was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four media partners in sixteen various tongues.
