This year’s dramatic World Series finish drew baseball’s largest audience in years

The viewing figures for last weekend’s World Series are finally in and they are ones for the books. The dramatic 11-inning Game 7 drew an average of 27.3 million viewers in the US, per Fox on Tuesday, becoming the most watched World Series game since 2017.

That measure only includes Fox’s broadcast of the match in the US. Add to that the swath of Canadian and Japanese fans eager to see their favorite team or star players, and the total live audience will have easily topped 40 million people watching baseball’s biggest game across the world. Canadians in particular tuned in en masse — with nearly half of the entire country watching the game.

The dramatic finale is the cherry on top of what has been a great year for America’s favorite pastime. The game has seen double-digit viewership growth across national game TV providers, and even in-person attendance for Major League Baseball has been strong, sliding over 29,000 fans per game after a pandemic dip.

Curveballs

Though per-game attendance in the league is below its 2007 peak — and the sport’s grip on America is nowhere near what it was during its golden age of the 1950s — the MLB has been working hard to stay relevant in our attention-span-challenged age. The league has rewritten rules, added pitch clocks, made bases bigger, and spent millions on technology — like the upcoming automated ball-strike challenge system — in a bid to make the game as fast, and umpiring as accurate, as possible.

Those measures seem to be working. Last year, the average length of a nine-inning MLB game dropped to 2 hours, 36 minutes, the lowest since 1984. And marathon battles are less likely, too, with just three games over the 3.5-hour mark in this year’s regular season — compared to a whopping 391 in 2021.

What isn’t hurting, either, is the arrival of superstars like Shohei Ohtani and series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who have helped to draw in new audiences all over the world.

All of this is helping the business of pro baseball, with the MLB reporting a record-high $12.1 billion in revenue last year. The strong viewership numbers also come at the right moment, as the MLB works to finalize its new multiyear rights deal after the league and ESPN agreed to end their 35-year partnership after this season.