Attention baseball fanatics! Major League Baseball (MLB) is experiencing a dream postseason in terms of audience in the United States, the best since 2017, according to data from the League Championship Series.
The figures are impressive: an average of 4.48 million viewers, which represents a 13% increase compared to last year. The success is largely due to the first two rounds of the postseason.
The American League Championship Series (ALCS) on Fox, Fox Sports 1, Fox Deportes, and streaming platforms averaged 4.99 million viewers across the seven games.
This equals the performance of last year’s ALCS, where the New York Yankees defeated the Cleveland Guardians in five games.
The ALCS series this year was broadcast on TNT Sports.
The performance of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who swept the Milwaukee Brewers in four games, influenced the audience. Shohei Ohtani’s game, with three home runs and 10 strikeouts in Game 4, which was played on a Friday night, averaged 3.51 million viewers.
The series averaged 4.7 million, representing a 17% decrease compared to last year’s six-game series between the New York Mets and the Dodgers on Fox.
The Toronto Blue Jays’ victory over the Seattle Mariners in Game 7, with a score of 4-3, drew an average of 9.03 million viewers, becoming the most-watched ALCS game in eight years. The audience peaked at 12.35 million in the ninth inning.
MLB has also experienced significant growth in Canada and Japan.
Toronto’s victory, which took them to the World Series for the first time since 1993, averaged 6 million viewers in Canada and was the most-watched Blue Jays game on Sportsnet in Canada.
Ohtani’s outstanding performance in Game 4 averaged 10.26 million viewers in Japan, the second most-watched LCS game in the country’s history. The 16-hour time difference between Tokyo and Los Angeles meant that the game was broadcast on Saturday morning in Japan.
The NLCS averaged a LCS record of 7.34 million in Japan, a 26% increase from last year, as fans continue to follow Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki in record numbers.
