The nail-biting extra-inning clash where the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 drew a aggregate over 50 million watchers across the US, Canada, and Japan markets. MLB announced this is the most-watched World Series finale after the 1991 contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Ratings Details
The Saturday epic game averaged 27.33 million audience members on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and their streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the week.
It also is the top-rated Fall Classic matchup after the 2017 final game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This marks a 16% improvement over the last finale between the Nationals and Astros, which drew 23.19M.
In the Nielsen ratings, the sixth game ranked 4th, the fourth game was 7th, Game 5 came in 8th, and the third game finished in 13th position.
International Viewership Numbers
In the Canadian market, the climactic game averaged 11.6 million viewers on the Sportsnet network and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This was the highest-rated English-language program in the country after the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the final game began at 9 PM local time, it attracted 12 million. This came after last Friday’s sixth game – in which Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yamamoto allowed one run in six innings – averaged 13.1M spectators, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a single network in the country.
Overall Totals and Trends
The full seven-match series recorded over 15.7 million viewers on Fox, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the Fall Classic has recorded viewership growth for two consecutive seasons.
Including the opening game telecast on Univision, the complete US viewership reached over 16 million. The overall Fall Classic viewership in Japan was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full playoffs on Fox and its sister channels averaged over 8 million watchers, an 8% increase compared to last year and Fox’s best postseason performance after the 2017 season.
Major League Baseball reported that the World Series was televised in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different tongues.
