One of the most memorable postseasons in Major League Baseball history saw viewership rise in line with the drama.
The 2025 MLB Postseason averaged 6.33 million viewers on U.S. television platforms, up 28% from last year (4.96M) and officially the most-watched postseason since 2017. (Nielsen’s methodological changes — specifically its February expansion of out-of-home viewing and September shift to “Big Data + Panel” methodology — would not explain a year-over-year increase of such size, but will generally skew historical comparisons.)
This year’s postseason included a record seven winner-take-all games. While that is in part because of the expanded Wild Card round, the four winner-take-all games across the traditional Division Series, League Championship Series and World Series tie 2017 and 2019 as the most in one postseason since 2011 (five).
Four winner-take-all games aired on broadcast television (three on FOX and one on ABC), tied with 2003 (all on FOX) as the most in any postseason. FOX ended up airing the nine most-watched games this postseason, the seven World Series games plus the Mariners-Blue Jays ALCS Game 7 (4.3, 8.91M; 9.03M across all platforms) and Tigers-Mariners ALDS Game 5 (4.1, 8.59M; 8.73M across all platforms).
The strong postseason followed a regular season of across-the-board viewership growth, with FOX (2.04M) and FS1 (322K) both up nine percent, ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” (1.83M) up 21% and TNT Sports (462K) up 29%. Some of those gains are within the range that would be accounted for by Nielsen methodological changes, but it should be noted that viewership was trending up even before Nielsen debuted its “Big Data + Panel” measurement in September.
Baseball’s viewership momentum arguably began during last year’s postseason, when the league benefited from long playoff runs by teams in the nation’s top two markets — the Dodgers, Yankees and Mets. Last year’s Dodgers-Yankees World Series averaged more than 15 million viewers, a figure that was not expected to be surpassed anytime soon, at least not unless the same two teams met again.
But despite swapping the top market Yankees for the Blue Jays — whose home market of Toronto is not counted in U.S. Nielsen estimates — this year’s seven-game Fall Classic officially outdrew last year’s five-game series. And while that is almost certainly because of the aforementioned Nielsen changes, there are few who would have expected viewership to be close enough to last year for methodology to matter.
From the regular season through the postseason, there were indications all year long that the interest level extended well beyond the biggest-market teams to include the Mariners, Tigers and Blue Jays — a change of fortune for a league that just two years ago averaged a record-low World Series audience of 9.1 million for a pairing of the Rangers and Diamondbacks.
