More people watched Game 7 of the 2025 World Series than any game since the 1991 Fall Classic. The game drew 51 million viewers across the United States, Canada and Japan. Overall, the entire World Series was the most watched globally since 1992 and it was a 19% increase over last season. That same Game 7 had roughly double the number of viewers in the United States as Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
In this day and age and in a non-football sport, that’s staggering.
Yes, NFL and college football people who love to scream at the other sports about ratings, we get it. You’re the true monster of American sports. You dominate us. We get it. I’m a big football fan, too, so I have no problem with more people watching it. There’s room to celebrate victories in other sports as well.
We should still acknowledge that the 2025 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays was a major success for Major League Baseball.
Unless you’re a network executive, you shouldn’t care about TV ratings. But these numbers tell us more about baseball than just ratings.
One of the loudest arguments against MLB right now revolves around salary. The Dodgers, the first repeat champions since 2000, had the top payroll in baseball, which means the suggestion is that if a team just “buys” a championship — it’s never even remotely that simple, by the way — then people will start to tune out the sport. In that narrative, it’s imperative for the league to get control of spending in order to bring back all the fans who quit watching.
You’ll also hear nonsense like, “it’s just the same teams every year!” The Blue Jays hadn’t been to the World Series since 1993. Last year’s runners-up, the Yankees, hadn’t been since 2009. The 2023 World Series pitted a team that won its first-ever World Series against a team that hadn’t been there since 2001.
So that argument doesn’t fly. Now we’re back to the whole “no one pays attention because it’s not fair without a salary cap” argument.
And yet, the numbers speak for themselves, don’t they? Not only did the Dodgers just win the World Series with the top payroll in baseball, but they are the repeat champions and 51 million people watched them win Game 7.
Were they watching to root against the Dodgers? Possibly.
Does it matter why people watched or does it only matter that they watched?
Again, the entire structure of this pro-salary cap argument is that the product is bad without it and people will stop watching because they’re bored. They want to see underdogs, not big spenders. And yet more people tuned in to watch the Dodgers and Blue Jays (who, by the way, had the fifth-highest payroll in MLB) than had in more than three decades.
The more people watch, the more the league makes money. This is a business. From this perspective, the league just had its most successful World Series since at least 1992. Given the current media environment with so many other viewing options on different mediums, you could probably make the argument it was the most fruitful World Series, I don’t know, ever?
I do know this much: the whole “MLB needs a salary cap to keep people interested” argument really collapses on itself when you see these kinds of numbers. Put it this way, do you really think a Brewers-Rays World Series would’ve done this kind of business?
It sets up an interesting discussion point for the owner side in front of the next CBA, coming next offseason. We know the players are very averse to a salary cap and the owners want one. I agree that it’s unfair to have such a gigantic payroll disparity between the Dodgers and the lower third or so of those other teams. I just think the solution is for the lower-tier teams to spend more.
There’s already revenue sharing. The richest teams are giving money to the “poor” teams (psst: None of them are poor).
With the league as a whole seeing what kind of interest this World Series generated compared to a year like 2023, it’ll be interesting to see how things unfold on the ownership side. We know they love making money. Will they really want to try and mess with what just happened in the name of satisfying some of the cheapest owners? Or will they tell the cheapest owners to start spending the money they get from the deep-pocketed ones?
Regardless, the argument that “baseball is dying” or “no one watches” due to lack of a salary cap was just exploded like both Death Stars. There are 51 million reasons to get a new argument.