A World Series involving heavyweight teams from the nation’s two largest markets will likely mean a significant increase in TV ratings for the Fall Classic. If that happens, the World Series will follow the pattern set in the early rounds of Major League Baseball’s postseason.
All three rounds of the playoffs saw double-digit increases in total viewers and key advertising demographics compared to 2023, according to Nielsen. The ratings service also announced that Americans watched 29.5 billion minutes of playoff baseball from Oct. 1-20. That’s more than the 28.3 billion minutes totaled by the top 10 streaming titles in Nielsen’s last three weekly rankings (September 9-29).
The Wild Card Round of the MLB Playoffs averaged 2.72 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, an increase of 21% year over year. The Division Series grew 16% year over year, averaging 3.56 million viewers across Fox, FS1, TBS and TruTV. Finally, the League Championship Series was up 13 percent to 4.96 million viewers per game on Fox, FS1 and TBS.
During the playoffs, viewership among adults 18-49 increased by about 18% compared to last year, and viewership among adults 25-54 increased by about 14%.
All of this bodes well for the World Series, which begins Friday night on FOX. But even better for the network is a matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees. They are two of the three winningest teams in baseball history and home to arguably the game’s two biggest stars, Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) and Aaron Judge (Yankees). .
The last time the teams met in the World Series in 1981, the series averaged 41.3 million viewers, the third-highest audience since Nielsen began tracking total viewers in the 1970s. It was a number. It’s unlikely this year’s series will come close to that, but it could potentially reverse the recent steep decline in World Series viewership. The least-watched World Series on record has occurred four times in the past four years, with last year’s average audience of 9.08 million viewers ranking last.
Viewing habits have changed far too much for this year’s World Series to return baseball to its peak in the late 70s and early 80s, but the Dodgers-Yankees matchup should at least reverse the lows of the past few years. . Barring extremes (longer series tend to draw in more casual viewers), a five-year (or more) high seems like a pretty decent bet.
