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ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The low-budget World Series is a surprisingly strong performer with U.S. viewers, delivering solid audience numbers for the initial set of games.
Fox Sports said late Tuesday that it averaged 12.26 million viewers across the network, Fox Deportes, and Univision for Game 1 of the World Series between the Rays and Brewers, down 8% from last year’s comparable 13.3 million viewers. The opener outperformed the comparable Game 1s from 2021 to 2023 that did not involve the Dodgers, as well as the pandemic-affected 2020 World Series that did.
Game 2, meanwhile, averaged 10.85 million viewers, 6% lower than the 11.6 million for 2025’s Game 2.
Many predicted Fox Sports would struggle with this year’s World Series without big-market teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, or Phillies. Despite that, optimism remained among MLB and Fox Sports, particularly as earlier rounds of the postseason showed a continued wave of growth for the league. Those hopes grew when Milwaukee posted the best local-market rating for a World Series Game 1 since 2019.
Though the Milwaukee market is MLB’s smallest, the ardent passion of the Brewers fans has been a defining storyline of this year’s World Series. The club’s faithful established several ticket and merchandise records. Thousands of Brewers fans at the Rays’ Tropicana Field made Game 3 feel like a Milwaukee home game, a situation that only escalated further with Game 4 in Florida.
Milwaukee then posted even higher metrics for Game 2, pulling in a 35.4 rating and 71 share. The rating denotes the percentage of TV homes in a given market watching a certain program, while the share refers to the percentage of televisions in use tuned to that event.
Tampa, by comparison, peaked with a local 12.1 rating and 41 share for Game 1.
“Down 7% is better than most were predicting and [an average of] 11 million viewers for Games 1 and 2 is better than anything out there that’s not the NFL,” said Fox Sports president of analytics and insights Mike Mulvihill in a social-media post. “More important, this ‘small-market’ series affirms one of the bedrock appeals of sports: Everyone has a chance.”
The Brewers enter Tuesday night’s Game 4 with a commanding 3–0 World Series lead, and are attempting to close out their first championship in franchise history. That would fulfill a vision created by former club owner and MLB commissioner emeritus Bud Selig, who moved the former Seattle Pilots to Milwaukee in 1970.
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