The nail-biting 11-inning contest where the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Blue Jays by one run drew a aggregate 51 million watchers in the US, Canada, and Japanese markets. Major League Baseball announced this marks the most-watched Fall Classic finale since the 1991 showdown between the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic game secured 27.33M audience members on Fox networks, its Spanish-language channel and Fox’s digital services. Per ratings data, it was the second most-watched broadcast of the previous week.
It also stands as the top-rated Fall Classic game after the 2017 edition final game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Astros, which drew 29.07M. This marks a 16% improvement compared to the last finale featuring the Washington Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19M.
In the weekly rankings, the sixth game ranked fourth, Game 4 was seventh, Game 5 came in 8th, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth place.
International Audience Numbers
In the Canadian market, the game drew 11.6 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports. This made it the highest-rated English broadcast in the country after the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding contest started at 9 PM local time, it averaged 12 million viewers. This came after the previous Friday’s Game 6 – where World Series Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a single run in six innings – averaged 13.1 million viewers, making it the most-watched World Series game on a single network in the country.
Overall Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-match series drew 15.71 million audience members on the Fox network, a 2% increase from last year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This represents the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has recorded viewership growth for two straight seasons.
Counting the Game 1 telecast on Univision, the total US viewership reached 16.1M. The total World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7M and 8.1M in the Canadian market.
The full MLB Postseason on Fox, FS1 and FS2 averaged over 8 million viewers, an 8% increase over last year and Fox’s best postseason ratings after 2017.
MLB stated that the World Series was broadcast in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four media partners in 16 various tongues.
