The Los Angeles Dodgers swept the MLB Tokyo Series against the Chicago Cubs in front of capacity crowds at Tokyo Dome. Major League Baseball revealed that an average of more than 25 million viewers viewed the first game of the Tokyo Series in Japan. As the most-watched MLB game in the history of the country registering an increase of more than 19 million viewers from the 2019 version of the Tokyo Series, the development took place amid changes in the media rights landscape. Danny “Hollywood” Rabinowitz mentioned the viewership figure during the Friday morning edition of the Joe Rose Show on WQAM in Miami, Fla.
During his remarks, Rabinowitz talked about how the audience eclipsed average viewership for any American baseball audience since Game 7 of the 2017 World Series. Despite the early start time of the game in the United States, FOX Sports averaged 838,000 viewers for the series opener. This was the strongest performance for an Opening Day game played in Asia and up 139% from the previous year when the Dodgers faced the Chicago Cubs in Seoul, South Korea. After Rabinowitz explained the numbers, Joe Rose asked how many of the 25 million viewership average in Japan had to do with “that one guy,” presumably referring to Dodgers two-way player and three-time most valuable player Shohei Ohtani.
“24.9 million,” Rabinowitz conjectured. “By the way, they barely had over a million in America.”
Rose remarked that the opening game of the series featured two Japanese pitchers facing one another on Opening Day for the first time in league history. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Dodgers defeated Shōta Imanaga and the Cubs by a final score of 4-1, and Rose added how pitchers coming over to the United States from Japan are doing really well. FOX Sports did not send its commentary teams to Tokyo for the series, instead utilizing Jason Benetti, Adam Amin and A.J. Pierzynski working remotely.
“We watched the game here, and we didn’t have the sound on obviously because we don’t have the sound on the TVs here,” Rabinowitz explained. “Apparently, there were a lot of issues because they didn’t send broadcasters out there – guys were calling stuff before it happened. Apparently, there were a lot of issues with that.”
“Alright,” Rose said. “I didn’t watch any of it, but yeah.”
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