Baseball Needs a Superteam Worth Beating

I was rooting for the Dodgers. I am not much of a baseball fan, and this was one of the first World Series I paid real attention to. They are making baseball appointment television again. Nobody can manufacture the drama, but a club can manufacture the stakes by building a team people love to watch or love to hate. Saturday’s 5-4, 11-inning win over Toronto delivered their second consecutive title.^[1] Sports Media Watch reported a preliminary U.S. average of nearly 26 million viewers across Fox Sports platforms,^[2] the biggest reported MLB audience since 2017, with a Canadian opponent.

The rebound began before this Game 7. Fox’s post-series report put the 2024 average on its main U.S. network at 15.2 million viewers, against 9.1 million in 2023.^[3] Both series lasted five games; neither average benefited from a Game 7. Nor does a Dodgers uniform guarantee an audience: MLB’s historical report puts their 2020 Series against Tampa Bay at 9.95 million,^[4] following a pandemic-shortened regular season.^[5] MLB’s account of the 2024 rebound describes Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in a Dodgers-Yankees Series, replacing the previous year’s Rangers-Diamondbacks matchup.^[6] A different matchup accompanied the rebound; these figures cannot isolate what spending or any one player contributed.

Average U.S. viewers per World Series game, 2020 to 2024

Japan supplies an audience the U.S. chart leaves out. When Yamamoto started Game 2 in 2024,^[7] MLB reported 15.9 million viewers in Japan, the country’s largest audience for an MLB postseason game.^[8] This year, Rogers reported that 18.5 million Canadians, 45% of the population, watched some or all of Game 7.^[9] That is reach, not the average audience; Rogers put the latter at 10.9 million across Sportsnet, Sportsnet+ and Citytv. I want baseball to keep widening that audience until “World Series” means an actual World Series.

The joy of sports is uncertainty. A fan in Pittsburgh can reasonably worry that a spectacular October comes at the expense of an interesting April if the best players keep collecting elsewhere. A large national audience does not compensate someone whose own team has stopped trying to contend. But the regular-season evidence is less bleak: MLB reported an average of 2.04 million viewers for games on Fox in 2025, up 9% from 2024.^[10] Its final standings put four clubs ahead of the Dodgers’ 93 wins.^[11] Neither fact makes a spending gap harmless; both argue against treating the season as a foregone conclusion. I want competitors built to beat Los Angeles, not a less interesting Los Angeles.

That means separating what Los Angeles bought from what smaller clubs can imitate. MLB reports that the Dodgers signed Yamamoto to a 12-year, $325 million contract before 2024.^[1] He earned the World Series MVP award after 2 2/3 scoreless relief innings in Game 7, a day after starting Game 6. Finding a star and affording him are different problems. Smaller clubs should invest in identifying talent before everyone agrees on its price. Baseball cannot budget for an 11-inning finale every year. Rival owners should aim to put the Dodgers back where Toronto had them in Game 7: tied in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded and two outs.^[9]