Through the World Baseball Classic the old game grows globally

by Riccardo Schiroli

The 2013 World Baseball Classic crowned the Dominican Republic as the IBAF World Champions. The last time the Caribbean island had celebrated a world title in their national sport was in 1948.

The Amateur World Series had picked up the legacy of Leslie Mann‘s John Moores Trophy (played in 1938 in Great Britain between the home team and the United States of America) as the first international baseball tournament and had become a yearly event in the 1940s. The 1948 Amateur World Series was played in Managua (Nicaragua) by 8 teams and Puerto Rico ended up being the runner up.

The name of first and second place teams are the only things in common between the 1948 and 2013 tournaments. It is obvious, since they belong to different eras.

The World Baseball Classic is relatively young (has just celebrated the third edition) but is enriched by the History of a World Cup that has cruised through the decades and seen the transition of International Baseball from an event shaped on amateur players to an event that features some of the most important pro players in the world.

The IBAF has agreed to sanction the World Baseball Classic from the beginning, but the move to award through the Classic the winners as the World Champions is at the same time bold and humble and demonstrates a long term vision by President Riccardo Fraccari and his Board.

The 2013 World Baseball Classic definitely sets a new pace for the growth of the game of baseball internationally.

The 39 games were broadcasted in the 5 Continents and the success of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (that made it to the final round) and Italy (that made it to the second round for the first time and turned out to be the only team to take a lead in the late innings of the game against the soon-to-be new World Champions) brought the game live in The Netherlands on public channel NOS (that had never had broadcasted a baseball game played outside the country) and in every household in Italy through Sport Italia 2.

In countries were baseball is more familiar to television audiences, the World Baseball Classic set viewership records.

The Championship game averaged a 39% share, peaking at 63, in the Dominican Republic on CDN and became the sport event with the best audience in the last decade. In Puerto Rico the game combined (on Telemundo, MLB Network and ESPN Deportes) a 64% share. The share of the semi final against Japan peaked at 73 on the island during the ninth inning.

In the Far East the World Baseball Classic was a huge success. In Japan, during the first round, one third of the country’s TV sets were tuned on the games and the semi final between Japan and Puerto Rico had a 51% share. In Chinese Taipei the game between Japan and Chinese Taipei played on March 8 recorded the highest rated cable program in the country’s history.

In the United States the 6 most watched post season baseball games are from the 2013 World Baseball Classic. With an average of 843,000 viewers, the Championship game became the second most watched non post season telecast in MLB Network history.

Direct TV in Latin America, ESPN America and Eurosport in Europe, ESPN Atlantic and Al Jazeera in Middle East and Africa, MLB Network in North America and ESPN Pacific Rim in the Pacific Rim provided pan regional TV coverage. The Classic was also broadcasted by local stations in Colombia, Cuba, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Italy, Spain, Israel, Canada, Mexico, Puertorico, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Chinese Taipei and Thailand.

The World Baseball Classic scored huge on the web, with fans from220 countries visiting the official website.

The IBAF web site recorded 75.540 unique visitors from March 7 through March 21 and over 80% of them were new visitors.

The World Baseball Classic generated 600 million social mediaimpressions, according to a Major League Baseball press release.

More than 75 different terms related to the World Baseball Classic trended worldwide on Twitter throughout the tournament. At many points throughout the Championship Round, every top trend in each participating country were related to the tournament.
Posts from the official World Baseball Classic Facebook page generated nearly one million likes, comments and shares during the tournament, and posts from the official Twitter feed were re-tweeted nearly 200,000 times.

The most important figures seem the ones related to stadium attendance.

The tournament drew an overall attendance of 885,212 (which means over 22,000 fans per game) that surpassed by more then 10% the previous record (801,410, set in 2009). The second round games in Tokyo and Miami totalled 325,282 fans, with a 58% increase over the attendance of 2009 second round.

The crowd of 23,431 recorded in Taichung for the March 5 game between Chinese Taipei and Korea is the largest attendance ever for a baseball game on the island.

The 44,256 fans that watched USA-Mexico at ‘Chase Field’ on March 8 were the second most attendance in the history of the tournament, after the 54,846 that attended the 2009 Championship game at ‘Dodgers Stadium’ in Los Angeles and the 34,366 fans that were in ‘Marlins Park’ on March 14 for Dominican Republic–USA were the fourth largest crowd of the history of the ballpark.

The World Baseball Classic produced resources accordingly to these brilliant figures.

The number of companies that sponsored the event rose from 26 of the inaugural edition to 56 in 2009 and peaked to 66 this year. The 2013 World Baseball Classic had 4 global partners: Brand USA, Delta Airlines, Konami and MetLife.

A total of 15 million dollars will be actually distributed to the participating Federations.

Of the total, half will be awarded to the players and half will be spent for the development and promotion of baseball.