The showdown between Yamamoto, Ohtani and Darvish was Japan's most-watched MLB playoff game

Major League Baseball fans in Japan didn't miss the story.

Game five of the win-or-win National League Division Series, featuring starters Yu Darvish and Yoshinobu Yamamoto — and, of course, slugger Shohei Ohtani — became Japan's most-watched Major League Baseball playoff game of all time, the league announced known Thursday.

The meeting between Darvish of the San Diego Padres and Yamamoto of the Los Angeles Dodgers was the first MLB postseason duel between Japanese-born starting pitchers. MLB stated that the game received a 19.2 rating in Japan, representing an estimated 12.9 million average viewers. This figure includes NHK broadcasts, but does not include streaming figures, which are not yet available.

The Dodgers won 2-0 at home and advanced to the National League Championship Series against the New York Mets. They are now just two wins away from the World Series.

More than 7.5 million viewers watched Game 5 of the NLDS on FOX domestically (including streaming numbers), for a total of more than 20 million viewers worldwide.

“The Ohtani audience in Japan is equivalent to approximately 33 million Americans watching a game at 9 a.m.,” Mike Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics at FOX Sports, wrote on X.

Ratings represent the estimated percentage of television households watching a game. So in a country the size of the United States, a rating of 19.2 would equate to approximately 33 million viewers.

Yu Darvish pitches to Shohei Ohtani (not pictured) in the sixth inning of Game 5. (Harry How/Getty Images)

Yamamoto pitched five scoreless innings, allowing two hits with two strikeouts and a walk. Darvish went longer, 6 2/3 innings, striking out four while walking one, but allowed both Dodgers runs and three hits. Ohtani didn't have his best performance, going 0-4 with three strikeouts. All three players were former stars in Japan's top league, Nippon Professional Baseball.

The first Padres-Dodgers NLDS game also enjoyed great success, garnering a 13.6 rating in Japan, an estimated 9.1 million average viewers. The Dodgers won that game 7-5.

Game 5 of the NLDS viewership in Japan surpassed the last three regular season games played between MLB teams in Tokyo. As best the MLB can determine, two regular-season MLB games – one featuring Hideo Nomo in 1996 and the other featuring Ichiro Suzuki in 2001 – achieved slightly higher ratings in Japan than Game 5 of this year's NLDS.

However, these games were not fully broadcast and MLB games were not televised in Japan as often as they are today, making comparison difficult. Some All-Star games from the Nomo and Suzuki era also had slightly more draws than Game 5.

The World Baseball Classic games are also very popular in Japan. A quarterfinal match between Japan and Italy – a game played in prime time in Japan – was rated 48.7. This is the highest WBC rating ever in Japan, making it the most watched WBC match ever in a country. For comparison: The Super Bowl 2023 achieved a rating of 40.4 in the USA

(Top photo by Yoshinobu Yamamoto: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)