If not quite as big a draw as Game 4 the prior night, Game 5 of the World Series delivered another audience in excess of 14 million on FOX.
Wednesday’s Blue Jays-Dodgers World Series Game 5 averaged 14.57 million viewers across all Fox Sports platforms, including 14.29 million on FOX — down 22% and 21% respectively from last year’s clinching Dodgers-Yankees Game 5 (18.60M; 18.15M), but behind only that game as the most-watched Game 5 of the Fall Classic since the Red Sox-Dodgers clincher in 2018 (17.70M).
The Blue Jays’ win, which peaked with 16.0 million in the 10 PM ET quarter-hour, trails only Game 4 the previous night as the most-watched game of the series.
The World Series is now averaging 12.52 million viewers entering Game 6, down 18% from last year’s full five-game series (15.20M) and the second-most watched Fall Classic through five games since 2018 (14.16M).
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. Those changes may be enough to make the difference in comparisons to years like 2021 and 2022, when the World Series averaged 11.5 and 11.6 million respectively through five games.
This year’s World Series is the first since 1993 to feature the Blue Jays, whose Canadian audience is not tracked in U.S. Nielsen estimates. Game 5 averaged 7.2 million viewers on SportsNet in Canada, bringing the combined U.S. and Canadian viewership figure to about 21.8 million. MLB said Friday that Game 5 averaged a combined 29.8 million across the United States, Canada and Japan.
While this World Series features only one U.S.-based home market, it certainly helps that said market is Los Angeles. The nation’s #2 market is so big that it alone has more homes than the combined markets for the 2021, 2022 and 2023 World Series.
