A World Series featuring marquee teams from the country’s two largest markets will likely mean a significant boost in TV ratings for the fall classic. If that happens, the World Series will follow the pattern of the earlier rounds of Major League Baseball’s postseason.

According to Nielsen, all three rounds of the playoffs saw double-digit increases in total viewers and key advertising demographics compared to 2023. The ratings service also says that Americans watched 29.5 billion minutes of play between October 1 and 20 -watched baseball. That’s more than the combined total of 28.3 billion minutes for the top 10 streaming titles in Nielsen’s three most recent weekly rankings, which cover September 9-29.

The wild-card round of the MLB playoffs averaged 2.72 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, up 21 percent year over year. The division series grew 16 percent year over year, averaging 3.56 million viewers across Fox, FS1, TBS and TruTV. Finally, the championship series was up 13 percent on Fox, FS1 and TBS, with 4.96 million viewers per game.

Audiences among adults 18 to 49 grew by about 18 percent compared to last year’s playoffs, and ratings among adults 25 to 54 grew by about 14 percent.

All of these things are good signs heading into the World Series, which starts Friday night on Fox. Even better for the network, though, is the game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees – two of the three winningest teams in baseball history featuring arguably the game’s two biggest stars: Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) and Aaron Judge (Yankees ). .

The last time the two teams met in the World Series, in 1981, the series averaged 41.3 million viewers – the third largest audience since Nielsen began compiling total viewers in the 1970s. This year’s series probably won’t come close to that, but it could reverse a sharp downward trend in World Series ratings of late. The four least-watched World Series ever occurred in the last four years, with last year’s average of 9.08 million viewers representing the low point.

Viewing habits have changed far too much for this year’s World Series to return baseball to the highs of the late ’70s and early ’80s, but the Dodgers-Yankees matchup should at least touch the lows of the past few years to turn around. Barring a sweep (longer series tend to attract more casual viewers), a five-year high (or more) seems like a pretty decent bet.