A blowout win, college football head-to-head, and a pair of nationally unfancied Wild Card teams led to the least-watched World Series game ever.
Saturday’s Game 2, a 9-1 Arizona Diamondbacks win over the Texas Rangers, averaged just 8.153 million viewers on Fox with another 225,000 tuning in on Fox Deportes. Both the Fox audience and the total audience (8.378 million) were record lows for any World Series game, falling behind even Game 3 of the 2020 bubble World Series between the Dodgers and Rays (8.34 million on Fox, 8.63 million including Fox Deportes).
The record-low Game 2 audience comes after a record-low for Friday’s Game 1, just the second series-opener to fall below ten million viewers (along with 2020’s bubble series).
Through two games, the early signs for this series aren’t promising, even if it goes to seven games. The two-game average is down by nearly two million viewers compared to 2021, and about 2.5 million compared to 2022. It’s even down by half a million compared to the 2020 series, which at the time set a new bar for futility. Each of those three series went six games, with viewership topping out in Games 5 and 6. If this series gets to seven, or even six, it’ll probably have a game top ten million. But if the Rangers end it in Phoenix, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it finishes without one game of at least ten million viewers, given where it is after two games.
Data for Monday’s Game 3, a 3-1 Rangers win that went head-to-head with Monday Night Football, should be available later on Tuesday.
[Data via Sports Media Watch]
