I stayed up until 3 am to watch the Czech/Russian final at Nagano. Great hockey game. Got up at 9, taped replay on TV.

I wanted to put a kiddie pool and a small sand box under my desk. Alas, such a thing is frowned upon here.

Also, most Americans who watched the Miracle on Ice swear they saw it live when, even though it was in New York, it was on a tape delay as well. It was shown hours earlier in Canada and the rest of the world.

This is not a global viewing event, indeed 90% of the world doesn’t know it is going on because they don’t care about baseball and a tournament that doesn’t include their country isn’t going to affect that.

For roughly the 3rd time, people in the US obviously do not care about the WBC, 2.8 million people watched the US in the semi-finals in 2009 (that is about the same number of people as watched the Detroit-Chicago hockey game on NBC last sunday), and barely more than 1/2 as many people in the US watched the Korea-Japan final. In other words, US baseball fans don’t really care about this tournament yet….and viewership is always going to be determined by who is in the game….just like attendance does.

The thing is that people around the world watch the world cup finals….for the WBC, at least so far, only people from countries whose teams are in the finals watch. I’m not even sure if people in the US would watch if the US team made it…after all, only 2.8 million people in the US tuned in to watch the US in the semi-finals in 2009 (approximately the same number of people that watched the Redwings play the Blackhawks this past Sunday afternoon).

*Calcaterra surreptitiously glances at the dinner tab*

“This is outrageous! I wouldn’t pay it if I were you!”

Dude, you’re on to something…

I picture a format something like, starting in October, all the best regular season teams from each league have a playoff where the winner from each league plays a 7 game series during the last week of October.

Could you imagine!!!

I’m glad to see Craig resisted his internal urge to snark up this post (I imagine that must have been difficult for him).  Maybe he’s finally realizing how awesome this tournament can be/already is.

“sit in the cabana by the pool and chit chat with all of the beautiful women”

and

“As too were those women who, by pure coincidence, were walking around the hotel.”

and

” the backup catcher for Team Italy ”

In your office or work setting?

Man, I feel for you.

However, I think ‘cktal’ has a good point. Perhaps MLB needs to do a separate ‘Americas Baseball Classic’ where the timezone issue isn’t so extreme.

why isn’t the World Cup a bigger TV draw than it is?

An estimated 1B* people watched the 2010 WC Final between Spain and the Netherlands, and that’s with two relatively small populated countries. I can’t imagine what it would be if it were say, Brazil and China, in the finals.

*http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/southafrica2010/organisation/media/newsid=1473143/index.html

ps The Superbowl gets around 250 million viewers worldwide.

Then again the World Cup football manages to get people to wake at night to view the games, so why not th WBC once it grows in reputation?

Even if the “Field of Dreams” ghosts were real, and those guys came back to play a game, and they televised that game, it STILL wouldn’t get the worldwide ratings of the Super Bowl.