Game 7 of the Blue Jays-Dodgers World Series drew almost 26 million viewers. (Photo by Emilee Chinn/Getty Images)
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Baseball is clearly having a moment — a big one — and maybe the greatest proof of this is how the MLB is dominating the NBA in terms of viewership of the two leagues’ respective finals.
Both the MLB and NBA saw their best-of-seven championship series reach a Game 7 this year, with baseball’s final game outdrawing the NBA’s final one by nearly 10 million viewers.
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ wild 5-4 Game 7 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays averaged a combined 26 million viewers on Fox, Fox Deportes and Fox Sports streaming services, according to Nielsen Panel Only Fast Nationals and Adobe Analytics. By comparison, the 2025 NBA Finals’ Game 7 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers averaged 16.4 million viewers on ABC, showing a staggering 58-percent gap in viewers between the two leagues’ finale.
With final metrics still pending, the 2025 World Series projects to average around 15 million viewers per game, compared to the 10.27 million this year’s NBA Finals averaged, the second-lowest on record.
This year’s World Series finale — which ranks as the most-watched World Series game since 2017 — gained massive TV numbers despite competing against several high-profile college football games, while the NBA Finals aired in June, which is a notorious TV programming desert that offers little competition.
It marks the second consecutive year that the World Series has outdrawn the NBA Finals. In 2024, the Dodgers-Yankees World Series averaged 15.1 million viewers, compared to 11.2 million for the Celtics-Mavericks Finals.
Some are saying MLB’s ratings spike indicates that baseball is the No. 2 sport in the nation, not basketball, behind football. “It appears baseball is firmly the number two sport in America. The World Series has demolished the NBA Finals over the last two years,” Hardcore Baseball podcaster Matt McCarthy wrote on X. “The pitch clock has changed everything and is bringing fans back. Conversely, I think fans are rejecting the style of play in the NBA.
Maybe more impressive than the U.S. viewership numbers, approximately 18.5 million Canadians — nearly 45 percent of Canada’s population — watched some or all of the World Series’ Game 7, according to sportsnet.ca.
MLB’s resurgence can be linked to an influx of young, marketable stars, most notably Dodgers two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, who took the mound as his team’s starting pitcher in the winner-takes-all Game 7. But it’s not just the Dodgers and Ohtani driving baseball’s ratings boom. The 2025 Wild Card — the first round of MLB’s postseason — set viewership records this year. In total, the 11 Wild Card Series games (all aired on ESPN networks) averaged 4.625 million viewers. That’s a 64 percent jump from last year’s Wild Card Series and highest average for the WCS round since the current format got officially introduced in 2022.
As Axios points out: Baseball’s ratings surge has arrived as an “important milestone for the MLB as it continues to finalize its lucrative new set of media rights deals through 2028.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonystitt/2025/11/04/mlb-dominates-nba-in-tv-viewership-of-respective-2025-finals/
