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Major League Baseball’s viewership tear has extended through another postseason round, as audiences around the world tuned into the league championship series in historically high levels.
Fox Sports said late Wednesday that its viewership for the ALCS, a seven-game thriller won by the Blue Jays over the Mariners, averaged 4.99 million viewers, essentially flat from last year despite only having one local U.S. market measured by Nielsen in the 2025 matchup. In the U.S., Game 7 of the ALCS on Monday averaged 9.03 million viewers, making it the most-watched ALCS game on any network since Game 7 in 2017 between the Yankees and Astros.
More historic figures, however, were posted north of the border as Canada’s Sportsnet averaged 6 million viewers for the Blue Jays’ clinching Game 7 win on Monday. The figure marked the network’s largest telecast of the team ever, and it surpassed a record that had stood since the 2015 ALCS. That audience represented about 15% of the entire Canadian population, a level of penetration seen in the U.S. only for the later rounds of the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl.
When combining the two countries, the blended average of 9.39 million viewers of the ALCS beat last year’s figure by 60%, though the Blue Jays were not involved then.
The 2025 National League Championship Series, won by the Dodgers in an emphatic sweep over the Brewers, was a slightly different story. That matchup averaged 4.7 million viewers on TNT Sports. That figure is down 17% from last year’s six-game NLCS between the Dodgers and Mets on Fox, a series that had set a six-year high.
Even with that decline, however, TNT Sports posted its largest overall audience for the National League playoffs, through 4 LCS games, since 2017, and boosted its audience by 18% compared to the same number of AL playoffs games last year.
TNT Sports and Fox Sports alternate coverage of the AL and NL playoffs on a year-to-year basis.
In Japan, meanwhile, the NLCS averaged 7.34 million viewers, up 26% from last year’s record-setting figure. That total was, of course, driven largely by widespread interest there in native-born Dodgers superstars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki. For the clinching Game 4 in which Ohtani hit three home runs and struck out 10 on the mound, an average of 10.26 million in Japan viewed, in a country of about 123 million.
Broader Trendlines
The LCS numbers largely extend a run of expanded MLB audiences that has included across-the-board boosts in the regular season, record-setting totals for the wild-card round on ESPN, and robust growth for the division series on Fox Sports and TNT Sports.
Overall, MLB postseason viewership is now averaging 4.48 million viewers per game, its highest level since 2017 and up 13% from a year ago.
The World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays will begin Friday in Toronto.
