Even though Japan’s viewer ratings are in the morning, the household average viewer rating is 42.4%
The 2023 World Baseball Classic (WBC) final, which ended with Japan’s victory, hit the jackpot in viewership ratings.
The American online sports media The Athletic and Sports Business Journal announced on the 23rd (Korean time) that the average number of viewers for the WBC final between the US and Japan, which was broadcast through the US cable channel Fox Sports 1 (FS1) the day before, was 4.48 million. cited and reported.
This is almost double the number of viewers compared to 2.29 million viewers in the 2017 WBC final, when the United States beat Puerto Rico and won the championship.
In addition, this year’s WBC final attracted the third larges스포츠토토
Even though it is a cable channel, more viewers watched the WBC final than ‘911: Lone Star’ (3.6 million) on terrestrial Fox broadcasting, and Fox broadcasting felt embarrassed.
Fox Deportes, a Spanish-language sports channel of Fox Broadcasting, also gathered 664,000 viewers, and the total number of viewers who watched the finals on both Fox channels reached 5.14 million.
Viewers for 15 minutes at the end of the finals, including the final confrontation scene more dramatic than the movie between Japan’s Shohei Otani (Los Angeles Angels), who has established himself as a baseball icon of this era, and Mike Trout (Angels), the best hitter of the time and ‘Captain America’ The number peaked at 6.5 million.
t number of viewers after NBC’s vocal audition program ‘The Voice’ (5.27 million) and CBS’ investigative drama ‘FBI’ (4.71 million), which aired the previous afternoon. NBC and CBS are terrestrial broadcasters.
There is still a long way to go for the WBC to further increase its popularity worldwide, but it can be seen as gradually increasing its status as the only national competition in which the world’s best baseball players participate.
Due to the nature of the national competition, it is interpreted that the United States, which is proud of the’baseball head’, challenged to win the championship for the second time in a row following 2017, and the American people showed their patriotism and led to a rapid increase in the number of viewers.
In particular, the Sports Business Journal introduced that the number of viewers for this final match was higher than that of the Wild Card Series, the first gateway to the Major League Baseball (MLB) postseason last year, and comparable to the next stage, the League Division Series.
Sports Hochi, a Japanese sports magazine, reported that the average viewership rating for the WBC final was 42.4%, even though it was a weekday morning in the Kanto region.
The moment Ohtani struck out Trout and confirmed the championship, the viewership rating soared to 46%, and the viewership rating of the emergency rerun of the final reached 22.2%.
The Japanese match, which won the WBC for the third time in 7 matches, recorded over 40% viewer ratings in Japan, reflecting the tremendous heat.
Like Ohtani, the undisputed MVP of this year’s WBC, it seems that baseball will become an opportunity to be loved all over the world.