The home country of Dodgers stars Shohei Ohtani, Roki Sasaki, and World Series Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto watched the club’s championship march at historic levels.
Major League Baseball said Wednesday the epic, seven-game World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays, in which Los Angeles claimed a second straight title, averaged 9.7 million viewers in Japan. Game 6 last Friday in particular averaged 13.1 million viewers on NHK-G, making it the most-watched World Series game ever in that country that was aired on a single network.
Game 7 on Saturday, a dramatic, 11-inning win for the Dodgers, then followed with an average Japanese audience of 12 million viewers on NHK-BS.
While the broadcast plan in Japan for the 2025 World Series differed from last year’s coverage of the Yankees-Dodgers matchup aired on multiple over-the-air networks there and had even bigger audiences, the latest viewership totals still reflect a strong devotion by fans there.
With the time difference, the World Series games aired in Japan in the late morning. When MLB has played in the country and in standard evening time slots, local television audiences have reached 25 million.
Global Power
Overall, Game 7 between the Dodgers and Blue Jays averaged 51 million viewers when combining viewership from Japan, the U.S., and Canada, making it the league’s most-watched game of any type since Game 7 of the 1991 World Series.
The Fox broadcast added an average of 27.3 million for the deciding game, the best U.S. audience for a World Series contest since 2017. Canada, meanwhile, averaged 11.6 million viewers for Game 7 between Sportsnet and French-language coverage on TVA Sports. The Sportsnet audience of 10.9 million was part of what was the most-watched English-language broadcast in Canada since the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, and the biggest broadcast of any type for network parent company Rogers Communications.
For the full seven games, the World Series averaged 34 million viewers across the U.S., Canada, and Japan, forming the best Fall Classic audience since 1992 and a figure up 19% from last year. The average viewership of 17.9 million from Canada and Japan in particular also represents the largest international viewership in World Series history.
The World Series, meanwhile, set a new record for merchandise sales, beating the mark set in 2022 for the Phillies and Astros, while also establishing an extended series of event milestones in digital and social media consumption.
