(Updated Thursday, November 2 at 4:29 p.m. ET: Final numbers for the World Series Game 7 are in, and the Fox broadcast averaged 28.2 million total viewers, down 29.5 percent from 2016’s comparable contest.)
Previously:
Last night was a huge win for the Houston Astros and a pretty big one for Fox — but the earliest Nielsen numbers still show that this World Series Game 7 was way down from last year’s.
Versus 2016’s landmark Chicago Cubs victory — the Windy City North Side-team’s first since 1908 — the 2017 Commissioner’s Trophy clincher in Los Angeles sunk 25 percent in overnight TV ratings. The final 9 innings of Astros-Dodgers earned an 18.8 rating, per very preliminary data. Compare that with last year’s 25.2.
Still, it was the second-best-rated baseball game since 2004’s Game 4 between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, which pulled a 19.7 rating.
Much like 2016’s Wednesday’s deciding matchup was way up from the prior Game 7 in 2014. To be specific, the Astros party rated 24 percent higher than the three-years-ago contest between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals (a 15.2).
And this one was 15 percent better than 2011’s 16.3 for the seventh game between the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals.
Not surprisingly, locally, the game was enormous in Houston. The 47.1 rating in America’s eighth-largest media market is the biggest of all time. You deserve it, Space City.
Last night the Astros beat the Dodgers 5-1 after getting to L.A. starting pitcher Yu Darvish early. The nail-biter of a series resulted in the first World Series championship for the southeast Texas franchise.
For the record: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a 2004 game was baseball’s third-highest rated.