Every year, the World Series draws in audiences from all around the globe. But the 2025 matchup truly emphasizes the “World” notion of MLB’s championship series.
With the Toronto Blue Jays from Canada and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are led by their Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, the global impact is clear in this year’s World Series. This spreads to all baseball fans who are watching their favorite players from the two teams on television, buying or wearing their jerseys or even just following players and team accounts on social media.
This year’s World Series matchup includes five players on the list of the 20-best selling jerseys of the season: Ohtani (#11), Freddie Freeman (#3), Mookie Betts (#4) and Clayton Kershaw (#12) from Los Angeles, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (#15) from Toronto. Los Angeles has had the player with the top-selling jersey in the league for five of the last six straight seasons.
The engagement of the World Series extends beyond TV reach. Social media has become a large outlet where fans follow the games and interact with postseason content on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter. Los Angeles’ official account has the most Instagram followers out of all the teams in MLB with 5.4 million, and Toronto’s are top five in the league with two million. Through jersey sale numbers and social media, new heights have been reached with the publicity and marketing of the World Series.
Both teams are filled with players who come from different countries all around the world, which adds to this year’s World Series being put on a global display. Outside of Ohtani, both teams have a total of 13 internationally-born players spanning from eight countries and regions. Los Angeles’ players span from Japan (Ohtani, Roki Sasaki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto), Cuba (Andy Pages), the Dominican Republic (Teoscar Hernández), Puerto Rico (Enqrique Hernández), South Korea (Hyeseong Kim) and Venezuela (Migel Rojas, Edgardo Henriquez). Toronto features players from Canada (Guerrero Jr.), Mexico (Alejandro Kirk), the Dominican Republic (Seranthony Domínguez) and Venezuela (Andrés Giménez).
This World Series has been filled with drama and jaw-dropping performances. It’s not everyday where you see a singular baseball game hit the 18-inning mark, which happened in game three. On Monday, Oct. 27, the battle between Los Angeles and Toronto reached 18 innings in total and lasted an entire six hours and 39 minutes, tying the record for the longest game in World Series history.
So how did that affect the viewership of the game? According to Nielsen, Fox and MLB, the game averaged 11.31 million viewers in the United States. On other sports channels, the World Series was competing with the NFL’s Monday Night Football game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Washington Commanders, which averaged 17.6 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes and NFL+ streaming. This program recorded the highest MNF Week 8 audience since the matchup between Washington and the Dallas Cowboys in 2014.
The World Series is no stranger to falling on Monday nights in October. This marked the 10th time that the Fall Classic was played on a Monday night since 1986. Nonetheless, it has only fallen on the same day as the Monday Night Football game five times on national network television. But this is the second time in a three-year span that the NFL game has beaten out the World Series in viewership on a Monday night, which isn’t exactly the best look for MLB.
The 18-inning element to the game added a unique twist to this Monday night baseball classic. Although the extra innings went live in prime time on the west coast, the game went well past midnight in the Eastern time zone. The length of the game most likely had an impact on the viewer average as it ended near 3 a.m. on the East coast. According to Fox, the United States audience peaked around 11:30 p.m. EST at 13.7 million viewers.
In spite of competing with the NFL, these viewership numbers are still pretty solid for MLB. Combining the U.S. and Canada, the average viewers for the Dodgers’ 6-5 win over the Blue Jays on Freeman’s 18th-inning walk off home run was 17.62 million. This was a 27% jump from last year’s World Series numbers. Throughout the first three games of the series, the Fall Classic averaged 18.73 million combined viewers in the United States and Canada which is a 25% increase in their books. The only other 18 inning World Series game in MLB history, which took place in 2018 between Los Angeles and the Boston Red Sox, averaged 13.3 million views.
This year, Toronto being in the World Series competition brings a whole new audience of MLB fans in Canada. As for Canadian broadcasting, the games are being aired live on Sportsnet, which is a network owned by a parent company of the team, Rogers Communications Inc. Then there’s Japan on the other side of the world, who is mainly attracted to tuning into the World Series because of Los Angeles star Ohtani, of course. For the first two games of the classic, Japan averaged 10.7 million viewers, extending the global spectrum of the viewership of the World Series.
All in all, the 2025 World Series has showcased baseball’s growth on an international reach, uniting fans from across continents through shared excitement and global star power. With record viewership, 18-inning thrillers and widespread social media engagement, this year’s Fall Classic truly lives up to its name as the World Series.