The 2023 World Baseball Classic came to a close last week with Team Japan earning a thrilling 3-2 win over the United States in the championship game.
This year’s edition of the international tournament was the most successful yet, with multiple attendance, viewership, merchandise and social media records being set.
The 2023 WBC produced three of the four most-watched games in the tournament’s history, with a quarterfinals matchup between Japan and Italy drawing a 48.7 rating. Japan’s games against Korea (44.4) and Mexico (42.5) also made the list.
Furthermore, the championship game between the United States and Japan was the most-watched WBC contest ever in the U.S. A peak combined average audience of 6.506 million viewers tuned in to watch Shohei Ohtani strike out Los Angeles Angels teammate Mike Trout to capture the gold for Japan.
As for countries that saw the largest overall viewership gains compared to the last WBC in 2017 , Taiwan led the way at 151%. Mexico (103%), Canada (44%), Korea (36%) and Puerto Rico (11%) rounded out the top five.
A total of 1,306,414 fans were in attendance for WBC games, which is a 20% increase over the previous record in 2017 of 1,086,720.
Merchandise sales across the four WBC host venues were the highest in the history of the event. Sales of merchandise on MLBShop.com and Fanatics additionally skyrocketed by 149% in comparison to the last tournament in 2017.
World Baseball Classic social media engagements increased
The average daily engagements per post more than doubled (102%) during the semifinal and final rounds for the World Baseball Classic social media account across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Ohtani gained more than 2.1 million Instagram followers during the tournament and became the first MLB player to surpass the four million mark.
Randy Arozarena increased had the greatest growth percentage of any MLB player in the past week as he increased his Instagram following by 299%. Arozarena also saw the most Twitter follower growth by percentage during the WBC with a 105% increase.
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