This year’s 111th playing of the Fall Classic finally ended Sunday night with the Kansas City Royals partying like it was 1985.

The series had its share of memorable moments (or forgettable ones if you’re Mets closer Jeurys Familia) including three Royals late-game comebacks, two extra innings epics and an opening night TV power outage. And while last year’s series garnered the second-lowest ratings in baseball history, this year’s affair posted some modest gains.

The Game 5 clincher scored an 10.0/17 rating with more than 17 million average viewers, according to Nielsen. That’s up 37% over last year’s Game 5 between Kansas City and San Francisco and the most-watched Game 5 since 2003. This year’s series averaged a 8.7/16 household rating with 14.7 million viewers, a 6% uptick from last year’s seven-game series, which posted somewhat inflated overall numbers thanks to a big viewer total for Game 7 (23.5 million). Overall, this year posted the best World Series average for any five games since 2009.

Not surprisingly, that was the last time a New York team appeared in the Series, demonstrating that there’s one market that always moves the needle more than any other. But the numbers were most gaudy overnight from Kansas City, which posted a ridiculous 60/80 rating for Game 5. That’s the highest local market rating for a World Series game since Diamondbacks fans in Phoenix drew a 62.3/80 rating for the epic Game 7 between Arizona and the Yankees, according to Fox. Royals fans also broke the meter for the 14-inning Game 1 classic, with Fox reporting 78% of all TVs in the K.C. market were tuned into the game. That marked at least the highest local rating for a World Series Game 1 in 20 years.

Baseball fever has gripped Kansas City since last year’s team made its improbable run to the A.L. pennant, putting an end to the big league’s longest postseason drought. At midseason, Kansas City posted the biggest average change in year-over-year ratings for any big league club, with viewership up 119%, according to Sports Business Journal. Last year’s World Series champ, the San Francisco Giants, posted much more modest gains throughout the season, showing baseball can still post big TV ratings, especially in the heartland.

New York’s overnight ratings for Sunday’s 12-inning heartbreaker earned a 25.5/40 rating, nothing to laugh at in the nation’s number-one media market, which boasts nearly 7.5 million TV households. While today’s World Series are still paltry compared to those of decades gone by—and compared to the NFL, which was being played just a few channels over—one could forgive baseball executives for enjoying a resurgent Fall Classic, even if their celebration is a bit more muted than the champagne showers that took place in the visitor’s locker room at Citi Field.

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