The World Baseball Classic finished with an audience that will likely rank among the largest of any non-football sporting event this year.
Tuesday’s Venezuela-United States World Baseball Classic final averaged 10.78 million viewers across FOX (10.23M) and Fox Deportes, marking easily the largest audience on record for the event. Viewership surpassed the previous high of 7.37 million for last Sunday’s United States-Dominican Republic semifinal on FS1.
Venezuela’s win, which peaked with 12.15 million viewers in the 10:30 PM ET quarter-hour, more-than-doubled the previous WBC final three years ago, a matchup of the United States and Japan that averaged 4.97 million across FS1 and Fox Deportes.
This year’s World Baseball Classic delivered six of the seven largest audiences in the history of the event (dates back to 2006), with the three above-mentioned games joined by U.S.-Mexico in pool play (5.02M), U.S.-Canada in the quarterfinals (4.30M) and two non-U.S. games — Monday’s Venezuela-Italy semifinal on FS1 (3.76M) and last Saturday’s Venezuela-Japan quarterfinal on FOX (3.14M).
Most-Watched World Baseball Classic Games
While the World Baseball Classic has always averaged respectable enough numbers — topping the three million mark for a 2017 final that aired on MLB Network and ESPN2 — it had previously maxed out at the level of a strong regular season game. This year’s tournament delivered multiple postseason-level audiences, topped by a title game that officially ranks as the most-watched baseball telecast outside of the World Series since the 2015 All-Star Game (10.91M).
The last time any postseason game delivered a larger audience prior to the World Series was more than 15 years ago during the 2010 League Championship Series. That of course comes with the caveat that Nielsen did not begin tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, did not do so in 100 percent of markets until last year, and is six months into a new methodology that combines “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel. Those changes will generally skew comparisons to past years.
As one might expect, the WBC final still fell short of the recent United States-Canada Olympic hockey gold medal game on NBC and Peacock (18.6M across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics). But Olympic competition is inevitably going to outdraw non-Olympic competition. A more apples-to-apples comparison is to last year’s Canada-United States Four Nations Face-Off final, which averaged 9.3 million on ESPN (albeit before Nielsen shifted to its current “Big Data + Panel” methodology).
Outside of football and the Olympics, one would have to go back to last year’s World Series to find a larger Nielsen-measured sports audience. (Netflix has claimed some larger audiences for boxing events citing other measurement companies.)
The full World Baseball Classic averaged 1.29 million viewers across the Fox Sports English-language networks, more-than-doubling the 2023 average (506K) and the highest for the event.
