LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dave Roberts had a bold prediction.
“More eyeballs are going to be watching this World Series than any other Series in history,” the Los Angeles Dodgers manager said.
Major League Baseball's dream matchup is the Dodgers and the New York Yankees. Massive markets, expansive fan bases and luminous lineups led by a transcendent star in Shohei Ohtani.
“This is like Ali-Frazier, or Magic and Bird, or Jordan and Isaiah Thomas, or Ohio State football against Michigan football,” Bill Wanger, Fox Sports executive vice president, head of programming and scheduling, said on the eve of Friday's opener.
This will be the first World Series with five former MVPs: Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman of the Dodgers and Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton of the Yankees.
This is only the fifth Series since the Wild Card Era started in 1995 featuring the teams with the top record in each league.
It is just the fourth that includes the home run leaders in each league after Lou Gehrig and Mel Ott in 1936, Joe DiMaggio and Ott the following year and Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider in 1956.
It is the first with a 50-homer hitter on each team in Judge (58) and Ohtani (54).
“The World Series matchup with our two biggest markets and a bevy of our biggest stars provides a unique opportunity to take another step forward on some of our most important strategic initiatives, namely a more national broadcast strategy, international growth, particularly in Japan, and heightened social media presence related to interest in the Series by stars from other sports and fields of entertainment,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said.
Game 1 delivered on the hype, with Freeman slugging the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history to cap LA’s 6-3, 10-inning win.
Ohtani's jersey tops MLB's sales, with Judge third, Betts fourth, Soto seventh and Freeman 18th. Ohtani and Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto have sparked record television viewers in Japan, where the Dodgers' Game 5 Division Series win over San Diego drew 12.9 million viewers — more than the average 9.11 million viewers in the U.S. for Texas' five-game World Series win over Arizona last year.
MLB launched its “Once in a Generation. Twice” ad campaign after the Division Series featuring Ohtani and Judge. It arranged “Sho Time/All Rise” digital billboards across New York and the Los Angeles area, including Times Square and the Beverly Center.
MLB and Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo placed 113 digital billboards throughout Tokyo earlier in the offseason, one for each home run and stolen base in Ohtani's record-setting first 50-50 season.
During Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night, MLB's TikTok account sent out clips to its 7.6 million followers not just of key highlights, but also the fashion players wore to the stadium and celebrities like Billie Eilish and John Legend watching from the stands. MLB said engagement on its social posts are up 47% this postseason.
Fox hopes the matchup spurs a ratings rebound. The network began broadcasting the World Series in the U.S. in 1996, when the Yankees' six-game win over Atlanta averaged 25.2 million viewers.
Since Boston's 2004 title averaged 25.4 million, the World Series has topped 20 million just once, 22.9 million in 2016 for the Chicago Cubs' first championship since 1908. Last year was a record low, down from 14.2 million for the Dodgers-Red Sox in 2018 and 14.1 million for the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros in 2019.
Those numbers reflect changes in how people watch games — less on linear TV — but also a dip in baseball interest. That 2004 World Series averaged more than twice as many viewers as that year's NBA Finals (Detroit vs LA Lakers). The NBA Finals has outperformed the World Series in five of the past seven years.
“We're expecting at least a five-year high and I think realistically maybe we can get to an eight-year high," said Mike Mulvihill, Fox’s president of insights and analytics. "It would be a nice surprise if we beat that Cubs-Cleveland Series in 2016. That seems like maybe a little bit of a stretch.”
Spurred by rule changes designed to increase action and speed up games, MLB regular season attendance rose 0.9% to 71.35 million, the first increase in consecutive years since 2011-12. ESPN’s Sunday night telecasts averaged 1,505,000 viewers, up 6% and its highest since 2019. Fox’s broadcasts averaged 1,879,000, up from 1,875,000. TBS’s early prime time games averaged 375,000, a 2% rise.
But local viewers declined in a market hurt by Diamond Sports Group’s bankruptcy and a carriage dispute in which Comcast Corp. dropped Diamond’s Bally Sports networks from early May until late July. Twenty-two teams had decreases, the Sports Business Journal reported.
Noah Garden, MLB’s deputy commissioner of business and media, believes the marketing and television landscape has changed markedly since the Cubs' triumph, especially during and after the coronavirus pandemic.
“People have moved all over the world, the way you can work from anywhere now and they've moved all over the country,” he said. “When you look at the viewership, yeah, certainly concentrated in LA and New York, but not all of it. Like there’s a tremendous amount of viewership and engagement coming from across the country.”
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AP Sports Writer Joe Reedy contributed to this report.
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