World Series Draws Monster TV Ratings As MLB Reclaims Edge Over NBA Finals
Image credit: (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
When it comes to World Series TV ratings, Major League Baseball is on quite a winning streak.
The 2025 World Series averaged 15.71 million viewers, the largest average viewership for a World Series since the Astros beat the Dodgers in the 2017 World Series. Those figures don’t include Canada, where the home-team Blue Jays set viewership records.
That’s a remarkable rebound after World Series viewership dipped to an all-time low two years ago, when the 2023 Rangers-D-backs World Series registered just 9.076 million viewers. Since then, MLB has reestablished World Series ratings to figures comparable to most of the 2010s.
And when compared to the NBA Finals, the closest analog in major U.S. sports, the World Series is relatively consistently drawing more viewers.
With the help of the data at Sports Media Watch, the trend reversal becomes clear.
During the 2000s, the World Series consistently outperformed the NBA Finals, averaging 4.2 million more viewers. Only once during that decade—2008’s Celtics–Lakers Finals—did basketball come out ahead, outdrawing the Phillies-Rays World Series that year by 1.2 million viewers.
That trend flipped completely in the 2010s. With the rise of LeBron James and Steph Curry, the NBA finals surged ahead and averaged 2.2 million more viewers than the World Series from 2010-19. The World Series outperformed the NBA Finals just once: The Cubs’ drought-breaking 2016 win over the Guardians, which is the most-viewed finals in either sport since 2004.
Now, the trend has once again reversed dramatically. In the 2020s, the World Series is averaging 1.5 million more viewers than the NBA Finals. The World Series has outdrawn the Finals in four of the past six seasons, including by an average of 4.6 million over the past two years.
It is worth noting that the way Nielsen measures ratings has changed recently. Nielsen has steadily increased measurements of out-of-house viewership this decade and has recently added data from smart TVs that could lead to slightly higher viewership numbers, so the comparisons from viewership numbers from the 2010s to now aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons. And the 2024 NBA Finals featured two of the league’s smallest markets in Oklahoma City and Indiana.
But the trend lines are consistent. MLB postseason ratings, which were on a steadily declining trend, have significantly reversed. Having the Dodgers a large-market team with massive stars in the World Series has definitely helped. But the ratings for other postseason series also ticked up.
There are likely multiple contributing factors that have led to the uptick, including the general fan response to the pitch clock and lessened amounts of dead time in games. As MLB works on new media contracts to replace the current Fox and Turner deals that expire after the 2028 season, it has a compelling viewership narrative to sell.
