Executives with Major League Baseball say the 2025 World Series was the largest international broadcast operation in the history of the sport, after a surge of interest from television audiences across Canada and Japan.
“It’s one of one. It doesn’t happen,” Dominick Balsamo, the MLB’s senior vice-president of global media partnerships, said sitting in a suite above the field at Toronto’s Rogers Centre just before Game 7 on Saturday night.
Below him was an intricate network of cameras. They were in the umpire’s mask and in drones flying around the stadium, all feeding into a colony of broadcast trucks parked in a lot across the street.
Inside one truck, production staff for the MLB’s international broadcast sat hunched in front of a wall of screens. “Ninety seconds to air everybody,” someone said. He called out again at the one-minute mark, at 45 seconds, at 30, at 10 and then the room went quiet.
An average of roughly 37 million people watched Game 7 between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers, including 10.9 million viewers across Canada, according to data from Sportsnet and preliminary figures from Fox on Monday.
In Canada, the game became the most-watched broadcast ever for Sportsnet parent company Rogers Communications, with 18.5 million, or about 45 per cent of the Canadian population, watching at some point.
It’s likely that the audience was even larger in Japan, which had higher viewership numbers for several of the earlier games. In Game 1, for example, Japan’s average audience was 11.4 million compared to 7 million in Canada, despite the game starting at 9 a.m. in Japan.
“I look at this World Series as Canada versus Japan with Hollywood right in the middle, which is an unbelievable combination,” Balsamo said.
The MLB did not expect Game 7 numbers on the Japanese TV audience or other international markets until mid-week. But a league source, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said early projections show the global audience could be the largest outside the U.S. since 1991.
Japanese audiences have been steadily growing for decades, but Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani has “taken it to the next level,” according to Balsamo.
“The Japanese audience, it’s unprecedented right now,” he said.
For the first time, the MLB allowed for four separate television productions to broadcast the World Series. Typically, Fox handles the U.S. broadcast and the MLB produces a more generic version for stations around the world, including in Canada, allowing them to take the feed and add their own commentary. But with Toronto in the mix this year, the World Series became a more international event.
“This is an extremely unique situation,” Balsamo said.
As part of Rogers’ deal with the MLB, Sportsnet was allowed to produce its own Blue Jays-centric broadcast of the World Series, with its own cameras and staff at the stadium. And with enthusiasm soaring in Japan, Japanese public broadcaster NHK was on the ground to make its own version as well.
“I counted probably over 100 cameras,” Ryan Zander, the MLB’s senior vice-president of broadcasting, said at the Rogers Centre, before Game 7. “A regional game, sometimes it’s like seven to 10 cameras.”
Zander started listing all the strange places they’d hidden cameras. They were in the foul poles, he said, and in the dirt at home plate.
“You can’t even see it,” he said.
