Fall Classic Game 7 Draws Over 50 Million Viewers In the United States, Canada and Japanese Regions.
The nail-biting 11-inning clash that saw the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Blue Jays by one run attracted a total 51M spectators in the US, Canada, and Japan territories. MLB stated this marks the highest-rated Fall Classic Game 7 after the 1991 contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Details
The Saturday memorable contest drew over 27 million viewers on Fox channels, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the previous week.
It additionally is the top-rated Fall Classic game after the 2017 final game involving the Dodgers and Houston Astros, which drew 29.07 million. This marks a sixteen percent improvement over the last Game 7 between the Nationals and Houston Astros, which attracted 23.19 million.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game ranked 4th, the fourth game was 7th, Game 5 came in eighth, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth position.
Global Audience Figures
In the Canadian market, the climactic game averaged 11.6M viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports. This made it the highest-rated English-language program in the country after the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the final game began at 9 PM local time, it drew 12 million viewers. This followed last Friday’s Game 6 – where Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed one run in six frames – drew 13.1 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series matchup on a single network in Japan.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The full seven-match World Series averaged 15.71M viewers on Fox, a two percent increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees matchup. This represents the first time since 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has seen audience growth for two straight years.
Counting the Game 1 telecast on the Univision network, the total American viewership was 16.1 million. The total World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The complete playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged over 8 million viewers, an eight percent increase over the previous year and Fox’s strongest playoff ratings since the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the Fall Classic was televised in over 200 countries and territories by 44 broadcasting partners in sixteen different tongues.
