While the World Baseball Classic has been called a “meaningless exhibition” by certain pundits like Keith Olbermann, it’s certainly not viewed that way everywhere. One country where the interest has been particularly strong is Japan. The Japanese team’s 9-3 quarterfinal win over Italy in Tokyo (which they’re seen celebrating above) was reportedly watched by 48 percent of all Japanese households, which is a higher household number than Super Bowl LVII drew in the U.S. for Fox this year (a 40 household rating, which is based on TV households, not overall households; the overall household percentage would be about 38 percent), and which is a Japanese record:
48.0% of Japanese households watched the Japan-Italy Quarterfinals game on TV last night, an all-time record for any WBC game.
This was the 5th consecutive game where over 40% of the country watched Samurai Japan play.https://t.co/Lj4Yi8wuEh
— Yakyu Cosmopolitan (@yakyucosmo) March 17, 2023
That article spells out that the 48 percent is indeed an average household number, not a peak (which was 54.5 percent). It also notes that the previous record of 44.4 percent was set in the Japan-Korea WBC pool play game on March 10.
Of course, the raw viewer numbers here would still favor the Super Bowl in the U.S., as the overall U.S. household numbers are much higher. There were an estimated 131 million total U.S. households as of January 2022, and there are an estimated 123.8 million TV households currently. So the 40 HH rating translates into averages of about 50 million households and about 113 million viewers. (A separate NFL-commissioned Nielsen survey with a different methodology estimated an average of 136 million viewers, but that isn’t easily comparable to more traditional ratings approaches.)
Meanwhile, Japan had 55.6 million households in 2021, so 48 percent of households is in the realm of 26 to 27 million households. That would be around 60 million viewers if using a U.S. household to viewer conversion estimate; different conditions in Japan might make that not exactly applicable. But it’s certainly impressive to see the percentage of the country tuning in for not just this particular game, but for all of the Japanese games to date. And it should be noted that it’s not just Japan that cares about this; Puerto Rico also posted remarkable share numbers.
https://twitter.com/CodifyBaseball/status/1636764172342943746
And the WBC in-person attendance across its far-flung venues has also set records, including at the U.S. stadiums:
2023 WBC SHATTERING record after record after record.
1st round attendance: Over 1 million (Up over 98% from the previous record)
USA vs Mexico: Most attended first round game EVER
My friends, the World Baseball Classic is officially one of the world’s biggest tournaments. pic.twitter.com/WbnmaxjrhV
— Ben Verlander (@BenVerlander) March 17, 2023
So while Olbermann is entitled to his views of the WBC as a “meaningless exhibition series” that decides to “split up teammates based on where their grandmothers got laid,” it’s clear that much of the world doesn’t agree with him.
[Yakyu Cosmopolitan on Twitter; image from MLB on YouTube]
