MLB’s Dream World Series matchup

Some dreams come true.

The World Series matchup between the Yankees and Dodgers – coveted by many in the sport for years – will officially take place after Los Angeles won the National League pennant late Sunday to join New York in the Fall Classic.

The meeting, which features two of baseball’s most popular and successful teams, revives a World Series rivalry that took place 11 times between 1941 and 1981 and became the event’s most frequent matchup – but not since. This year’s World Series will also feature Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers and Aaron Judge of the Yankees, the league’s two biggest stars sharing the sport’s most prominent stage, and is the culmination of a dazzling postseason that marks MLB’s biggest month has once again caused a stir. Game 1 is scheduled for Friday at Dodger Stadium.

The question now facing MLB and Fox Sports, which will broadcast the World Series domestically, is how big the viewership can be now that the heavyweight battle between the Yankees and Dodgers has been determined. The base for the event is low, as last year’s clash between the Rangers and Diamondbacks set a record for the least-watched World Series, averaging 9.1 million viewers.

It’s a virtual lock that the Yankees-Dodgers will do much better, and in other recent seasons, average World Series viewership has generally hovered between 11 and 14 million. There have been three notable outliers in the last 15 years: the 2017 World Series between the Astros and Dodgers (18.9 million), 2016 with the Cubs and Cleveland (22.8 million), and 2009 between the Yankees and Phillies (19.3 million). However, the 2017 and 2016 World Series both played the full seven games – which had a huge positive impact on increasing viewership – and the latter also saw Chicago break its famous 108-year championship drought. The six-game event in 2009, meanwhile, was the Yankees’ last World Series appearance until this year.

More broadly, the entire U.S. television industry continues to experience unprecedented upheaval, driven largely by cord-cutting and cord-cutting. Consumers’ increasing rejection of the traditional pay-TV model has pushed the number of subscribers with a cable or satellite subscription to 53.7 million, down 12% from last year and just over half corresponds to the 2014 level.

“Can this overcome some of the fractures we are seeing in the pay TV market? I think so,” says William Mao, Octagon SVP of Global Media Rights Consulting Front Office Sports. “I am optimistic about this. You have the top two [U.S.] Markets, these big teams and big stars. If it’s competitive – and I think it will be – it will just grow and build. This will also be seen again on over-the-air television, which continues to grow and I think will help bring audiences here.”

Mao predicted that with these factors, the Yankees-Dodgers World Series could surpass an average viewership of 20 million and challenge the 2016 numbers.

Not just the USA

However, domestic television is far from the only media story of the World Series. Despite the expected increase in U.S. viewership, the numbers in Japan, Ohtani’s home country, could be even greater. At some Division Series games, the Dodgers’ Japanese attendance significantly exceeded the U.S. numbers, even though the total population was about a third as large.

Because there is a 16-hour time difference between the West Coast of the United States and Japan, MLB playoff games typically air in the morning hours. To that end, Ohtani’s World Series debut will take place in Game 1 on Saturday morning in Tokyo – a factor that could help boost ratings there to the kind of numbers typically seen for late-stage NFL playoff games in the USA can be seen