Fox, MLB Look to Counter Lower World Series Expectations

Conventional wisdom would suggest that this year’s World Series between the lower-budget Brewers and Rays is facing a tough road to match the viewership of recent Fall Classics featuring the big-market Dodgers. MLB and Fox Sports, however, are looking to extend the sport’s recent audience momentum and confound those expectations. 

This year’s World Series doesn’t feature megastars such as the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani or Yankees’ Aaron Judge, and it’s also a clash of the Nos. 11 and 38 U.S. media markets in Nielsen rankings, with Milwaukee coming in as the smallest of any MLB team. The Rays-Brewers matchup also brings together the MLB’s fourth and 11th smallest payrolls in a divergence from the sport’s big-money trends. 

What the league and network do have, however, is a run of audience boosts so far this MLB postseason. Among the recent figures:

• Despite a four-game sweep by Milwaukee, the National League Championship Series between the Dodgers and Brewers averaged 7.53 million viewers. That figure marked the best LCS viewership on any network since 2015, and was up by 60% from last year’s NLCS on TNT Sports with the same two teams.
• The AL Division Series on TNT Sports averaged 3.5 million viewers, up 17% from the comparable figures in 2024 and marking its best showing for that round since 2022. 
• The MLB wild card round, shown exclusively on NBC Sports platforms, did not have a publicly released aggregate viewership figure, as some broadcasts were exclusive to Peacock and NBCSN. Several games shown on NBC, however, reached viewership milestones, including a two-game Yankees sweep of the Red Sox that was the most-watched wild card series under the current format. 

An outlier to the broader trend was the six-game American League Championship Series between the Guardians and Rays, which averaged 3.7 million viewers on TNT Sports. That figure is down 24% from the comparable 2024 ALCS on TNT Sports, as the broadcast schedule grappled with a shift of Game 3 to a rare LCS afternoon time slot due to weather in Cleveland, a postponement of Game 4, and direct competition from the NFL for three of the games. 

Still, the audience average beat the first six games of a comparable Astros-Rays ALCS matchup from 2020 by 44%. 

Last year’s World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays averaged 15.7 million viewers, essentially matching the year before, even with the loss of a Nielsen-measured U.S. market among one of the competing teams. That World Series, however, needed a full seven games and plenty of drama to draw even with the 2024 Fall Classic between the Dodgers and Yankees.

The low point for World Series viewership was in 2023 with the Diamondbacks and Rangers, which averaged 9.1 million viewers. Since then, Nielsen has implemented a series of methodology changes, including an expansion of out-of-home measurement, the new Big Data + Panel process, and this year’s improved counting of co-viewing. 

Each of those changes should be impactful to this year’s World Series audience count, particularly the out-of-home expansion, as four of the seven scheduled games will happen on Friday and Saturday nights. The only head-to-head competition with the NFL, meanwhile, will be for Monday’s Game 3 at Tropicana Field, which will go up against a Monday Night Football game between the Cowboys and Eagles. 

Two years ago during the Yankees-Dodgers World Series, MLB scored a rare win over the NFL in viewership for a similar Game 3.