Not everyone made it to the back nine of the second 18-inning World Series Game 3 in seven years, but the game retained more than half of its peak audience into the wee hours of the morning.
Monday’s 18-inning Blue Jays-Dodgers World Series Game 3 averaged 11.41 million viewers across all Fox Sports platforms, including 11.16 million on FOX alone — both down 16% from Dodgers-Yankees last year (13.64M; 13.21M). As was the case with the previous 18-inning World Series game, Red Sox-Dodgers Game 3 in 2018, those figures do not include the entire game.
Nielsen only measures viewership from the first to the last national ad, and FOX eventually stopped running national ad inventory (instead airing network promos). Thus, the final innings of the game were not included in the official viewership number.
The 2018 game was rated through the 14th inning. If that was the case for this year’s game, that would mean it was rated through about 1:36 AM.
Viewership peaked at 13.17 million during the 11:30 PM ET quarter-hour, more than three hours before the game ended. According to Fox Sports researcher Michael Mulvihill, Game 3 was still averaging eight million viewers during the 2:45 AM ET quarter-hour, when Freddie Freeman hit a walk-off home run. Mulvihill added that the audience at that late hour was actually higher than for the first quarter-hour of the game.
FOX said Wednesday that Blue Jays-Dodgers delivered the largest audience for Game 3 of the Fall Classic since 2021. But more broadly, it was the fourth-least watched Game 3 since 2012 — ahead of only Phillies-Astros in 2022 (11.37M), the record-low Rangers-Diamondbacks in 2023 and Rays-Dodgers in the COVID bubble of 2020. And given the changes in Nielsen methodology, specifically the expansion of out-of-home viewing and addition of “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes, it is almost certain that viewership would have trailed that Phillies-Astros game all things being equal.
But that is perhaps to be expected given the headwinds. This year’s World Series is just the third to ever feature the Blue Jays, whose Canadian audience does not count toward U.S. Nielsen viewership. Game 3 averaged 6.2 million viewers on SportsNet in Canada — it was unclear whether that spans the entire game — bringing the combined U.S. and Canadian viewership total to 17.62 million, up 27% from last year’s all-U.S. series.
In addition, Game 3 faced competition from NFL “Monday Night Football.” The competing Commanders-Chiefs game averaged 17.6 million viewers on the ESPN family of networks, up 32% from the Giants-Steelers game that aired opposite the World Series last year.
In the three years when Game 3 of the World Series has fallen on a Monday night opposite the NFL, it has been the least-watched game of the series to that point. (Game 3 would have been on a Monday in 2022, but was postponed due to rain.)
Through Game 3, the World Series was averaging 11.52 million viewers on FOX — trailing only last year as the highest three-game average since 2019. Given the modest increases over 2021 (+5% from 10.96M) and 2022 (+3% over 11.18M) it is likely that this year’s average would trail those series all things being equal.
The combined U.S. and Canadian average is 18.73 million through Game 3, up 25% from last year’s all-U.S. matchup.
