The Blue Jays-Dodgers World Series is starting to pick up steam on U.S. television.
Tuesday’s Blue Jays-Dodgers World Series Game 4 averaged a series-high 14.81 million viewers across all Fox Sports platforms, including 14.53 million on FOX — both down 11% from Dodgers-Yankees last year (16.7M; 16.28M). That is the smallest year-over-year decline for this year’s Fall Classic.
Toronto’s win, which peaked with 16.7 million in the 10 PM ET quarter-hour, trails only last year as the most-watched Game 4 of the World Series since Astros-Dodgers in 2017, surpassing even Red Sox-Dodgers in 2018 (13.56M).
Keep in mind that Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100% of markets until this year. In addition, Nielsen shifted to a new “Big Data + Panel” methodology last month that adds data from smart TVs and set-top boxes to its traditional panel. But while those changes are likely to make the difference in comparisons to a year like 2018, the gains over subsequent years were substantial enough that they are unlikely to be explained by methodology alone.
Game 4 marked the first World Series start for Dodgers two-way star Shohei Ohtani, whose previous start in the NLCS was widely described as the greatest individual performance in baseball history. It also came one night after a memorable 18-inning Game 3 marathon.
The Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series is now averaging 12.16 million viewers on FOX, trailing only last year as the highest four-game average since Dodgers-Red Sox in 2018 (13.53M). With the series heading to a sixth and potentially seventh game, it is not out of the realm of possibility that it could catch or surpass last year’s matchup of the nation’s top two television markets — which averaged 15.20 million viewers on FOX and 15.81 million across all platforms.
Keep in mind that this year’s Fall Classic is the first since 1993 to feature the Blue Jays, whose Canadian audience is not tracked in Nielsen’s U.S. viewership estimates. An exact viewership figure for Game 4 on Canada’s Rogers SportsNet was not immediately available, but the combined U.S. and Canadian audience was 21.5 million — up 21% from last year’s all-U.S. series and the most-watched MLB game across the two nations since the last World Series Game 7 in 2019.
The full series is averaging 19.3 million across the U.S. and Canada, up 23% from last year and the highest at this point since 2016. As goes without saying, none of the intervening series featured the Blue Jays.
