Yankees-Dodgers effect: World Series Game 1 draws biggest audience in 7 years

Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam to open the 2024 World Series had the audience it deserved.

Game 1 of this year’s Fall Classic between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers drew an average of 15.2 million viewers between Fox, Fox Deportes and Fox Sports streaming services, the network announced Saturday. That makes it the most watched World Series Game 1 since 2017.

That’s an increase of 62% from Game 1 of the 2023 World Series, which featured a pair of smaller-market teams in the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks. That was the least-watched opening game ever.

Friday’s audience peaked at 17.8 million from 11:30 p.m. ET (roughly when Yankees pitcher Nestor Cortes took over in the bottom of the 10th inning) to the end of the game (when Freeman hit the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history).

Los Angeles won the battle of local market number, posting a 19.1 rating (the percentage of the potential audience that could theoretically be watching) and a 58 share (the percentage of the total audience watching television at the time) to New York’s 13.2/37.

That’s basically what MLB was envisioning when the Dodgers clinched their trip to face the Yankees in the World Series. The league couldn’t ask for much better than its premier AL team, featuring presumptive AL MVP Aaron Judge, and its premier NL team, featuring presumptive NL MVP Shohei Ohtani, facing off in a battle of its two biggest markets.

Of course, the question then becomes why are these the best ratings since 2017 and not earlier. There are some broader reasons for that — most notably the industry-wide decline in television viewers over the past decade and the COVID-19 dip that hit the sports world in 2020 — as well as some series-specific circumstances.

In the case of 2017, that was another large-market battle, with the Dodgers against the Houston Astros. At that point, the Dodgers were in the World Series for the first time since their title in 1988, and the Astros were playing for their first title (and, as we know now, were willing to go above and beyond to get it).

The 2017 numbers pale in comparison to 2016, though, when the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland were competing to break World Series droughts of 108 years and 68 years, respectively. That game drew 19.4 million viewers.

Ratings tend to go up as the series go on, so the 2024 World Series will likely see bigger numbers down the line. Next up is Game 2 on Saturday (5:08 p.m. ET, Fox).