A World Series involving marquee teams from the country’s two largest markets will likely mean a sizable increase in TV ratings for the fall classic. If that comes to pass, the World Series will follow a pattern set by the earlier rounds of Major League Baseball‘s postseason.
All three rounds of the playoffs posted double-digit gains in total viewers and key ad demographics compared to 2023, according to Nielsen. The ratings service also says that Americans watched 29.5 billion minutes’ worth of playoff baseball from Oct. 1-20. That’s more than the combined total of 28.3 billion minutes for the top 10 streaming titles in Nielsen’s three most recent weekly rankings, covering Sept. 9-29.
The wild card round of the MLB playoffs averaged 2.72 million viewers on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, up 21 percent year to year. The division series grew by 16 percent year to year, averaging 3.56 million viewers across Fox, FS1, TBS and TruTV. Finally, the league championship series were up 13 percent on Fox, FS1 and TBS, coming in at 4.96 million viewers per game.
Ratings among adults 18-49 rose by about 18 percent compared to last year during the playoffs, and viewing by adults 25-54 grew by about 14 percent.
All those things are good signs heading into the World Series, which begins Friday night on Fox. Even better for the network, though, is the matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees — two of the three winningest teams in baseball history that feature arguably the game’s two biggest stars in Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) and Aaron Judge (Yankees).
The last time the two teams met in the World Series, in 1981, the series averaged 41.3 million viewers — the third largest audience since Nielsen began collecting total viewer tallies in the 1970s. This year’s series isn’t likely to come anywhere near that, but it could reverse a sharp downward trend in World Series viewing recently. The four least-watched World Series on record have occurred in the past four years, with last year’s average of 9.08 million viewers representing the nadir.
Viewing habits have changed far too much for this year’s World Series to bring baseball back to its late ’70s-early ’80s peak, but the Dodgers-Yankees matchup should at least reverse the past couple years’ lows. Barring a sweep (longer series tend to pull in more casual viewers), a five-year (or more) high seems like a pretty decent bet.
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