If below last year’s best-case matchup of New York and Los Angeles, the World Series got off to a healthy start in the United States.
The first two games of the Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series averaged 12.5 million viewers across Fox Sports’ TV and digital platforms — including a Univision simulcast of Game 1 — down 14% from Dodgers-Yankees last year (14.5M), but behind only that series as the most-watched Fall Classic through two games since Nationals-Astros in 2019.
In particular, Game 1 averaged 13.31 million across all platforms Friday night and Game 2 drew 11.63 million on Saturday. The Nielsen-only audiences on FOX were 12.26 million for Game 1 and 11.40 million for Game 2, peaking at 14.08 and 13.67 million respectively.
Keep in mind that Nielsen in February expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets — up from about two-thirds previously — and in September shifted to a new methodology that adds data from smart TVs and set-top boxes to its preexisting panel. Those changes could make a difference in comparisons to 2021 or 2022 (though in all probability, not the record-low series of 2020 or 2023).
At the same time, this year’s series has the disadvantage of being the first Fall Classic since 1993 to feature the Blue Jays, whose Canadian audience is not included in U.S. Nielsen estimates. In Canada, Games 1 and 2 averaged 7.2 million across SportsNet and RDS. The combined U.S. and Canadian average audience of 19.8 million is up 27% from last year’s all-U.S. Dodgers-Yankees series (15.6M).
After last year’s World Series pit the nation’s top two markets, covering 13.33 million U.S. TV homes, this year’s matchup accounts for only 5.9 million, all in Los Angeles.
But L.A. is such a large market that it alone has more homes than the combined markets in 2021 (5.26M in Houston and Atlanta), 2022 (5.78M in Philadelphia and Houston) and 2023 (5.30M in Phoenix and Dallas). In fact, the Dodgers alone make this a bigger market World Series than any non-Dodgers matchup in the past decade, including Cubs-Indians in 2016 (4.96M in Chicago and Cleveland).
U.S. TV homes represented by World Series markets
In addition to the U.S. and Canadian audiences, Major League Baseball said Tuesday that the first two games averaged 10.7 million viewers in Japan, the home nation of Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani. Across the United States, Canada and Japan, the first two games averaged 30.5 million. (As it is not standard practice to report combined viewership figures across three different nations, much less two, it is difficult to put that figure in any real context.)
