adminThe 2023 World Baseball Classic (WBC) final, which ended with Japan’s victory, recorded good figures in viewership ratings
. Reportedly, citing the announcement of Fox Broadcasting, that the average number of viewers of the WBC finals between the United States and Japan, which were broadcast through the Internet, was 4.48 million.
Compared to the 2.29 million viewers in the 2017 WBC Finals, when the United States beat Puerto Rico and won the championship, this figure is almost double.
This year’s WBC Finals attracted the third largest number of viewers after NBC’s vocal audition program ‘The Voice’ (5.27 million viewers) and CBS’ investigative drama ‘FBI’ (4.71 million viewers), which aired the previous afternoon. NBC and CBS are terrestrial broadcasters.안전놀이터
Even though it was a cable channel, more viewers watched the WBC final than ‘911: Lone Star’ (3.6 million) on terrestrial Fox. Fox Deportes, a Spanish-language sports channel on Fox, also gathered 664,000 viewers, with a total of 5.14 million viewers watching the finals on both Fox channels.
The number of viewers during the last 15 minutes of the finals, including the final confrontation scene more dramatic than the movie between Japanese Shohei Ohtani (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’ peaked at 6.5 million.
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.
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 MLB postseason last year, and comparable to that of the next stage, the League Division Series.
Sports Hochi, a Japanese sports magazine, reported that the average viewer 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 urgently scheduled rerun of the final reached 22.2%.
The Japanese match, which won the WBC for the third time in 7 matches, recorded more than 40% viewer ratings in Japan.