Los Angeles — Dave Roberts made a bold prediction.
The Los Angeles Dodgers manager said, “There will be more eyeballs watching this World Series than any other series in history.”
The dream matchup in Major League Baseball is the Dodgers and the New York Yankees. A large market, wide fan base, and brilliant lineup led by a transcendent star named Shohei Otani.
“This is like Ali-Frazier, Magic and Bird, Jordan and Isaiah Thomas, or Ohio State football against Michigan football,” Bill Wanger, vice president and head of programming and scheduling at Fox Sports, said Friday the day before Opening Day. .
This World Series will be the first in which five former MVPs, including Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman of the Dodgers, and Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton of the Yankees, will participate.
This series is the fifth series featuring the teams with the best records in each league since the wild card era began in 1995.
He is the fourth player to lead the league in home runs, following Lou Gehrig and Mel Ott in 1936, Joe DiMaggio and Ott the following year, and Mickey Mantle and Duke Snyder in 1956.
Judge (58) and Ohtani (54) are the first hitters to hit 50 home runs for each team.
“The World Series matchup with our two biggest markets and our biggest stars is part of our most important strategic initiatives: a more national broadcast strategy, international growth, especially in Japan, and attracting stars from other sports and entertainment sectors. We have increased our social media presence around interest in the series,” said Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.
The first game was played to much hype as Freeman hit the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history to give Los Angeles a 6-3, 10-inning victory.
Otani’s uniform ranked first in MLB sales, with Judge coming in third, Betts coming in fourth, Soto coming in seventh, and Freeman coming in 18th. Ohtani and Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto sparked television audience records in Japan. The Dodgers’ Game 5 Division Series win over San Diego attracted 12.9 million viewers. This is more than the average viewership of 9.11 million viewers in the United States for Texas’ Game 5 World Series win. I passed Arizona last year.
MLB released ‘Once in a Generation’. Advertising campaign following the Division Series featuring TWICE’s Ohtani and Judge. ‘Sho Time/All Rise’ digital billboards were placed throughout the New York and Los Angeles areas, including Times Square and Beverly Center.
MLB and Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo placed 113 digital billboards throughout Tokyo early in the offseason, one for each home run and stolen base that set Ohtani’s first 50-50 season record.
During Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night, MLB’s TikTok account sent its 7.6 million followers key highlights as well as clips of the fashion players wore on the field and celebrities like Billie Eilish and John Legend watching from the stands. MLB reported a 47% increase in engagement on social posts this postseason.
Fox is hoping this matchup will spur a viewership rebound. The network began broadcasting the World Series in the United States in 1996, when the Yankees won their sixth straight victory over Atlanta, averaging 25.2 million viewers.
Since Boston’s win in 2004 averaged 25.4 million viewers, only once has a World Series topped 20 million, and in 2016, when the Chicago Cubs won their first championship since 1908, it topped 22.9 million. Last year, the Dodgers-Red Sox hit an all-time low of 14.2 million. The Washington Nationals and Houston Astros had $14.1 million in 2018 and $14.1 million in 2019, respectively.
These numbers reflect a shift in how people watch the game rather than linear TV, as well as a decline in interest in baseball. The average viewership for the 2004 World Series was more than double that of that year’s NBA Finals (Detroit vs. Los Angeles Lakers). The NBA Finals have surpassed the World Series in five of the last seven years.
“We’re expecting at least a five-year high, and realistically we think we could get to an eight-year high,” said Mike Mulvihill, Fox’s president of insights and analysis. “It would be amazing if we beat that. The 2016 Cubs-Cleveland series. That seems like a bit of a stretch.”
Thanks to rule changes designed to increase action and speed up the game, MLB regular-season attendance rose 0.9% to 71.35 million, the first consecutive increase since 2011-12. ESPN’s Sunday night broadcast averaged 1,505,000 viewers, up 6%, its highest since 2019. Fox’s broadcast averaged 1,879,000 viewers, up from 1,875,000. TBS’ initial primetime games averaged 375,000, an increase of 2%.
But local viewers have declined as the market has been hammered by the bankruptcy of Diamond Sports Group and a transportation dispute that led Comcast Corp. to suspend Diamond’s Bally Sports network from early May to the end of July. The Sports Business Journal reported a decline of 22 teams.
Noah Garden, MLB’s deputy director of business and media affairs, believes the marketing and TV landscape has changed noticeably since the Cubs’ victory, especially during and after the coronavirus pandemic.
“People have moved all over the world in a way that they can now work from anywhere, and they’ve moved all over the country,” he said. “If you look at the viewership, it’s definitely concentrated in LA and New York, but not entirely. “It’s as if we’re getting a huge amount of viewership and engagement from all over the country.”
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AP Sports Writer Joe Reedy contributed to this report.
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