The Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in a thrilling roller coaster ride of a Game 5 to win the 2024 World Series. With high hopes that the series could be the highest rated in years, Major League Baseball and Fox were treated to some great numbers. But the short series limited its potential range and impact.
Game 5 of the World Series drew 18.6 million viewers. It’s the highest single game viewership for the World Series since before the pandemic, when Game 7 of the Nationals-Astros series was watched by just over 23 million viewers.
For a more direct comparison, the Game 5 audience was the largest Game 5 viewership since 2017, when the Dodgers squared off with the Astros in the World Series. That year, Game 5 had an impressive 18.94 million viewers.
For the course of the World Series, it was the best for Fox Sports and MLB since that 2017 Fall Classic. Over the five games, Dodgers-Yankees averaged 15.2 million viewers, peaking with the Game 5 audience. There was a lot of hype coming into the series that this year’s World Series matchup, which was the best possible result for MLB in terms of viewership and reach, would showcase how high baseball ratings would go.
Unfortunately, the short nature of the series never truly showed what the full potential of a Dodgers-Yankees matchup could be. Game 6 and Game 7 would have reached even higher viewership totals, but we’ll never know just what the number could have been thanks to the Yankees’ epic collapse in Game 5. Because of that, the 15.2 million viewer average is well below what most folks estimated before the series, including yours truly.
In spite of the short series, it was still an encouraging World Series and postseason for the sport. It was the highest rated World Series since 2017 and outdrew every NBA Finals since 2018 as well. It’s tough to compare across even that short period of time given sports ratings now have the benefit of out-of-home viewing added. However, the fragmentation of the television and streaming landscape serves as a pretty massive counterweight.
Overall, Fox averaged 7.485 million viewers throughout the postseason, marking a sizable increase of 42% over last year. Baseball will hope the momentum from a regular season and postseason that trended upward will continue next spring.
