Major League Baseball fans in Japan did not miss history.
A win-or-go-home Game 5 of the National League Division Series that featured starting pitchers Yu Darvish and Yoshinobu Yamamoto — and, of course, slugger Shohei Ohtani — became Japan’s most-watched Major League Baseball playoff game ever, the league announced Thursday.
The meeting between Darvish of the San Diego Padres and Yamamoto of the Los Angeles Dodgers was the first-ever MLB postseason match-up of Japanese-born starting pitchers. MLB said the game drew a 19.2 rating in Japan, which amounts to an estimated 12.9 million average viewers. That figure counts the telecast on the station NHK, but does not include streaming numbers, which are not available yet.
The Dodgers won 2-0 at home to advance to the National League Championship Series against the New York Mets; they’re now two wins away from the World Series.
More than 7.5 million viewers watched Game 5 of the NLDS on FOX domestically (including streaming figures), for a total of more than 20 million global viewers.
“Ohtani audience in Japan roughly equivalent to 33 million Americans watching a game at 9 in the morning,” FOX Sports’ Mike Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics, wrote on X.
Ratings represent estimated percentages of TV households watching a game, so in a country the size of the United States, a 19.2 would roughly equate to 33 million viewers.
Yu Darvish pitches to Shohei Ohtani (not pictured) during the sixth inning of Game 5 . (Harry How / Getty Images)
Yamamoto threw five scoreless innings, allowing two hits with two strikeouts and one walk. Darvish went longer, 6 2/3 innings and struck out four while walking one, but allowed both Dodgers runs as well as three hits. Ohtani did not have his best showing, going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. All three players were formerly stars in Japan’s top league, Nippon Professional Baseball.
The first game of the Padres-Dodgers NLDS also did large numbers, bringing in a 13.6 rating in Japan, which is estimated at 9.1 million average viewers. The Dodgers won that game 7-5.
Game 5 of the NLDS viewership in Japan outranked the last three regular-season games played between MLB teams in Tokyo. As best MLB can determine, a pair of regular-season MLB games — one featuring Hideo Nomo in 1996, and the other Ichiro Suzuki in 2001 — drew slightly higher ratings in Japan than Game 5 of this year’s NLDS.
But those games weren’t broadcast in full, and MLB games were not carried on TV in Japan as often as they are today, making a comparison difficult. A couple of All-Star Games from the eras of Nomo and Suzuki also drew slightly more than Game 5.
World Baseball Classic games have also garnered massive audiences in Japan. A quarterfinal game between Japan and Italy — a game that was played in Japan, in primetime — rated 48.7. That’s the highest WBC rating in Japan to date, making it the most-watched WBC game ever in any country. The 2023 Super Bowl, for comparison, drew a 40.4 rating in the U.S.
(Top photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)
