When we zoom out from the playoff brackets and storyline arcs, the most compelling narrative from the 2025 Major League Baseball (MLB) postseason is the dramatic uptick in demand, both globally and domestically, that began around the end of September and accelerated right through to the decisive Game 7. As the chart above shows, the ramp-up in demand begins near the start of the Wild Card round (~Sept 30), and then steadily climbs, eventually peaking in early November. The dotted trend line (showing +137.7 % growth) underscores an event-series that substantially outperformed the average sports-property benchmark in this period, as well as outperforming exceptional global sport leagues such as the English Premier League across the same time.
This jump in demand wasn’t just incremental, it was structural. According to MLB’s own press-release, Game 7 of the 2025 World Series averaged 51 million viewers across the U.S, Canada and Japan, the highest mark for any MLB game globally in 34 years. Canada and Japan mattered especially: Canada’s English-language broadcast pulled in an average of 11.6 million for Game 7 alone, the most-watched English-language telecast in that country outside the Winter Olympics. The shape of the demand curve tells a story of compounding momentum: The Wild Card round reinvigorated general interest (fans tuning in after the long regular season).The League Championship Series further intensified stakes and narratives, and the World Series itself delivered a culturally resonant matchup, a storied franchise (Los Angeles Dodgers), a national-market challenger (Toronto Blue Jays), extra innings, and global star power, culminating in a late-night Game 7 that stretched into the deep curiosities of even casual viewers.
In short: the demand build-up aligns with what we would expect from an “event series,” but the scale is meaningfully elevated. For content/rights/international planning teams, this signals that the MLB postseason is functioning less like a “niche sports bracket” and more like a global entertainment tent-pole. That’s especially meaningful when seen in context of other sports in the same window — the fact that this chart pits MLB’s surge against the English Premier League (EPL) benchmark, and yet MLB outpaces it, reinforces how standout 2025 has been.
According to Parrot Analytics’ Demand360 data, average global demand for the postseason reached 29.83 times the market average, a 68 percent uplift from 2024’s 17.79 times benchmark. In other words, the world wasn’t just watching more baseball, it was talking about it, sharing it, and embedding it in cross-platform conversation at a rate unseen since the league’s streaming and international rights expansions.
Part of that year-on-year surge lies in narrative design. Where 2024 delivered a decisive World Series sweep that ended abruptly, 2025 offered the opposite: a tension-filled arc that stretched to seven games and ended in extra innings. The season’s underlying parity helped — both League Championship Series went the distance, giving fans nearly three weeks of elimination-game storylines. In the language of demand, every close series acts as a new content drop; the longer and tighter the matchups, the longer the social and search tail.
But 2025’s rise wasn’t just about drama. It reflected a deeper internationalization of the MLB ecosystem. The Toronto Blue Jays’ run to the World Series brought an entire country into the ratings race, while Shohei Ohtani’s first postseason as a pitcher/hitter for the Dodgers transformed the sport into a truly Pacific event. Between Japan’s NHK coverage, Canada’s Sportsnet numbers, and U.S. primetime slots, the postseason stitched together three of baseball’s largest markets into a single viewing block. That fusion alone explains part of the 2025 lift: audiences who previously followed separate storylines suddenly converged on a single shared spectacle.
MLB’s strategic schedule also played its part. Streaming access was easier: Amazon’s Prime Video carried highlights in multiple territories, while the Apple TV+ bundle exposed casual sports fans to postseason clips in entertainment feeds. Accessibility, compounded by narrative tension, turned 2025 from a strong performance into a breakout moment. The comparison to 2024 crystallizes the point that baseball’s postseason didn’t merely regain its old audience, it built a new, globally participatory one.
Audience Demographics
As the 2025 postseason expanded its global footprint, the composition of its viewership offered a strategic advantage: a broad, high-value audience rather than a narrow niche. The demographic lens reveals how the viewership mosaic aligns with commercial priorities. On gender, the data suggests a near-even split across platforms, countering a common stereotype of male-only sports fans. According to LG Ad Solutions, in the 2021 playoffs a “large chunk” of the Major League Baseball audience were female, while over two-thirds of households reported streaming or both streaming and linear. Generation-wise, the chart highlights three distinct clusters:
- The “Millennials” (ages ~33-42) segment forms 34% of the global audience slice, indicating a strong cohort of established professionals with spending power.
- "Gen X+” (43+) contributes 32%, signalling an audience traditionally stable in engagement and monetisation potential.
- Younger viewers — “Zennials” (26-32) at ~21% and “Gen Z” (16-25) at ~13% — show meaningful presence, though smaller in share.
These generational splits lend themselves well to brand-casting across life-stages: Millennials and Gen X+ already occupy prime purchasing years (homes, cars, premium subscriptions), while the younger segments provide a growth runway.
Complementing generational data, third-party research confirms MLB’s shifting age profile: the average age of an MLB.TV viewer dropped from 48 to 44 between 2018 and 2023. Meanwhile, US-based SponsorPulse data shows 56% of engaged MLB audiences are male, with the most active age group between 35-54. Hence, the dataset underscores a key insight: the 2025 postseason did not just capture “traditional baseball watchers” — it attracted middle-age core viewers, while also threading in younger segments and a nearly balanced gender base.
From a media-planning perspective this matters: The dominance of Millennials & Gen X+ fits premium advertisers hoping to reach high-income households. The participation of younger viewers supports streaming & social extensions of the event. The near parity gender split expands the usable inventory for advertisers looking beyond male-centric activations. In sum, the audience composition complements the demand surge: the stakes were high, the story captured cross-generational interest, and the demographics offered genuine commercial upside rather than a legacy-skew.
The International Footprint
One of the most striking shifts in the 2025 postseason lies not just in raw demand, but in where that demand came from—and how it reflects the truly global scale of the event. The “travelability” map reveals major markets well beyond the United States reacting at multiples of the average event: Canada (~37.5×), Japan (~33.9×), Taiwan and Venezuela (~32×) and even Mexico (~23×).
Canada’s surge is especially notable given the participation of the Toronto Blue Jays—the first Canadian team to reach the Fall Classic in decades. Game Seven averaged 11.6 million Canadian viewers, making it the most-watched English-language broadcast in the country outside the 2010 Winter Olympics. Meanwhile in Japan, despite a 9 a.m. local start time, Game 7 still drew 12.0 million viewers on NHK-BS, cementing its status as the most-watched individual World Series game in that country.
By the end of the series, the combined U.S + Canada + Japan average viewership stood at around 34 million—up 19 % vs the previous year in those three markets alone. This highlights two key dynamics: first, a structural expansion of the audience base beyond the core U.S. market; second, the power of narrative arcs that incorporate international stars and national-market representation. The Dodgers’ roster, for instance, included globally recognised names from Japan (Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto), Venezuela, South Korea and more, and Toronto brought the whole of Canada into play. From a rights and distribution lens, this means the 2025 MLB postseason was not a “U.S. event with some overseas interest” — it behaved like a global entertainment moment. The travelability map signals the value of prioritising localisation (language, media partner, commentary), international streaming accessibility, and cross-platform discovery in markets with strong latent demand.
By late October 2025, the global sports conversation felt curiously unbalanced. At a time when Erling Haaland was scoring for fun in the Premier League and Max Verstappen was closing the gap in another imperious Formula 1 season, baseball players—traditionally confined to an American orbit—were suddenly commanding more worldwide attention. The data makes that shift plain. On Parrot Analytics’ demand curve for global athletes, most competitors cluster around the “Average” band, where household names across sport typically sit. Giannis Antetokounmpo (≈ 7.5×) and Jannik Sinner (≈ 8.1×) hover in the “Good” zone, for elite performers attracting strong but steady engagement. Push further along the x-axis and you reach “Outstanding,” home to Haaland (19×) and Verstappen (22×), two of the most commercially magnetic figures in global sport. And yet, during the MLB postseason, six baseball players appeared on that same right-hand slope. Aaron Judge (14.2×), Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (11.1×) and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (9.0×) all landed in “Outstanding” territory, matching or eclipsing the global resonance of basketball and tennis stars.
Then, at the far edge of the graph, isolated in the “Exceptional” tier, stood Shohei Ohtani, measured at an extraordinary 42.9× the market average. That puts Ohtani comfortably ahead of Verstappen and almost double Haaland’s global demand. It’s a staggering outcome for a sport long regarded as geographically niche. His reach now stretches well beyond the diamond: Japan’s NHK reported record postseason audiences, and his every at-bat trended across U.S. and Asian social media simultaneously. Ohtani’s transnational appeal—anchored in a two-way skillset unseen in modern baseball—has redefined what an MLB superstar looks like. Parrot Analytics notes that from January to October 2025, he averaged 167× demand in Japan and 70× in the United States, positioning him at the same global attention level as the most in-form footballers and Formula 1 drivers. His commercial footprint tells the same story. Ohtani’s partnerships with New Balance, Porsche Japan and Fanatics illustrate how he now functions less as a league ambassador and more as a global brand ecosystem unto himself.
Together, these data points reveal the deeper truth of the 2025 MLB postseason: it wasn’t merely a tournament defined by drama—it was a showcase of star power so potent it bent the global sports conversation. For a few decisive weeks in October,
The Postseason That Redefined Baseball’s Global Ceiling
For a few weeks in late 2025, baseball stopped being a regional pastime and became a global spectacle. The postseason’s surging demand wasn’t an anomaly; it was a signal that the sport’s narrative and talent have finally crossed the threshold into mainstream international relevance.
In an age where audience attention is the world’s most contested currency, the MLB didn’t just compete — it won. It outdrew football leagues, rivalled motorsport’s glamour, and produced athletes whose resonance matched or exceeded the icons of other sports. Shohei Ohtani’s dominance wasn’t just personal; it was proof of concept — that baseball, when told through the right stories and distributed on the right platforms, can stand shoulder to shoulder with the global giants.
The 2025 postseason proved something elemental: baseball’s drama, scale, and star power are no longer confined by borders.
