Two years ago, the Dodgers became . The Toronto Blue Jays are a Canadian team.
Ratings reached the stratosphere when the two teams collided in .
Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that the game drew a record 51 million viewers in the United States, Canada and Japan, making it the most-watched MLB game since Game 7 of the 1991 World Series.
The series averaged 34 million viewers across three countries, making it the largest worldwide audience for a World Series since 1992. Viewership outside the United States was the largest ever, including other countries not yet counted.
In the U.S. alone, an average of 16.1 million viewers watched each game, an increase from last year despite the loss of the New York Yankees and the appearance of Team Canada (the series was also more dramatic last year with seven games and five games last year).
Ratings for the World Series were higher than the NBA Finals for the third year in a row and the fifth time in the last six years, this year by 56%.
The World Series’ strong ratings and attendance numbers that have increased for the fourth straight year emphasize owners taking the risk of canceling the sport in search of the salary cap next winter.
The league was forced to suspend work at the end of the 1994 season and the beginning of the 1995 season, but average attendance did not return to pre-strike levels until 2006. Attendance quickly dwindled again, as game times routinely exceeded three hours (a pitch clock solved that), and in the midst of a pandemic.
Despite recent increases, attendance remains 10% below its 2007 peak.
The Atlanta Braves announced Wednesday that their 2025 revenue through Sept. 30 reached $671 million, up 10% from last year, despite missing the playoffs for the first time since 2017.
The Braves’ revenue includes $71 million, which relies heavily on ticket sales for 3 million Braves games each year. (As a publicly traded company, the Braves are legally required to make their financial data public, but the Dodgers and most other teams are not.)
According to Fox data, Los Angeles was the top U.S. television market in World Series viewership, followed by San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis and Milwaukee.
The Athletics’ current and future home bases, Sacramento and Las Vegas, respectively, rounded out the top 10.
In Japan, which has one-third the population of the United States, the World Series averaged 9.7 million viewers. In Canada, a country with one-tenth the population of the United States, the series averaged 8.1 million viewers.
Game 7, broadcast in Canada, was the most-watched English-language broadcast outside of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
