One of the most thrilling games in baseball history had ratings to match.
Per Sports Business Journal, Saturday’s Game 7 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays drew an average of 25.5 million viewers on Fox and peaked in the late innings with 31.5 million viewers.
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Per SBJ, that makes it the most-watched baseball game since Game 7 of the 2017 World Series between the Dodgers and the Houston Astros, which averaged 28.3 million viewers.
And those numbers don’t include Canadian viewership on Sportsnet. Per Front Office Sports, 10.9 million Canadian viewers on average watched Saturday’s game. That’s roughly 1/4 of Canada’s population of 41-plus million people.
The Fox numbers are not the official Nielsen ratings but early data that SBJ gained access to. SBJ reports that when the official ratings are announced, that number is expected to see a low single-digit percentage bump.
The Dodgers delivered a second straight World Series championship and the best baseball ratings in years.
(Daniel Shirey via Getty Images)How Game 7 ratings stack up
Per SBJ, Game 7 ratings dwarfed those of last year’s Game 5 World Series clincher that featured teams from the two largest U.S. markets as the Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees. That game drew 18.2 million viewers.
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This year’s Game 7 viewership also easily outpaced Game 7 of the NBA Finals between the small-market Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder. Per SBJ, 16.2 million viewers tuned in to watch the Thunder clinch the franchise’s first NBA championship.
The numbers were also competitive with the 2025 NFL season opener between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles, which drew 28.3 million viewers on NBC. And SBJ projects that Game 7 drew higher viewership than five of the past seven College Football Playoff national championship games.
Game 7 was a thriller
The Dodgers rallied from a 4-2 deficit and tied the game with a Miguel Rojas solo home run in the top of the ninth inning. They then got out of a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the ninth with a spectacular third-out catch by Andy Pages on a fly ball to the warning track that prevented the game-winning run from crossing home plate.
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A Will Smith home run in the 11th, followed by some more game-saving defense in the bottom of the inning, secured a 5-4 Dodgers win and a second consecutive World Series championship for Los Angeles.
The Game 7 drama to conclude a series that had already delivered multiple spectacular moments resulted in the best baseball ratings in eight years.