Japan has been obsessed with baseball for generations, but Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani's first World Series is taking the game to unprecedented levels of popularity in the country.
The second game of the World Series between the Dodgers and New York Yankees attracted an average of 15.9 million viewers in Japan, about 12% of the population.
The Dodgers' thrilling 4-2 victory over the Yankees in Game 2 – which featured strong pitching play from Japanese ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but which had fans holding their breath when Ohtani exited in the 7th inning with an injury shoulder – it was the most exciting I've ever watched an MLB postseason game in Japan.
During the game, the United States actually slipped below Japan for the first time as the second-largest television market for baseball. About 13.8 million viewers in the United States — home to a much larger population of 346 million — watched the game, according to data released Monday by Major League Baseball and Fox Corp.'s sports division.
Japan is 16 hours ahead of Los Angeles, so the first two games of the series began there at 9 a.m. Saturday and Sunday morning. The matches are broadcast in the country by Fuji TV, NHK BS and J Sports.
The Dodgers announced that Ohtani will play Game 3 of the World Series in New York, ensuring that Japanese fans will once again watch him in large numbers.
The high-profile clash between baseball's two most valuable franchises – the Dodgers and Yankees – has become a bonanza for Fox Sports, which is broadcasting the games in the United States. So far, viewership is on track to reach levels not seen since the 2017 World Series. Perhaps more importantly for the game's future, viewership among 18- to 34-year-olds, a demographic coveted by advertisers, increased by 93 percent in this series, according to Nielsen. And social media views (345 million) and engagement (25 million) were the highest in World Series history, according to the league.