The 2024 Major League Baseball postseason has been a viewership hit domestically. Now, it’s becoming clear how big a deal it is internationally, too.

The league said Thursday that the decisive Game 5 of the National League Division Series between the Dodgers and Padres played Oct. 11 drew an average audience in Japan of 12.9 million viewers. The figure—easily surpassing a comparable U.S. average of 7.5 million for the elimination contest—set a new high as the most-watched MLB postseason game in Japan. The Japanese figure also surpassed television ratings from the last three times the league has played in Tokyo. 

Game 1 of the Dodgers-Padres NLDS series, marking the MLB postseason debut of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, drew an average audience of 9.1 million, a figure roughly tripling the comparable U.S. figure of 3.1 million.  

Those totals are happening despite a 16-hour time difference between Tokyo and the U.S. West Coast that results in many games being shown in Japan’s morning hours. In addition to the time difference, Japan is also outdrawing the U.S. in some MLB playoff viewership despite the obvious North American base of the league and a U.S. population size that is nearly three times the size of Japan’s.

Capitalizing on a Legend

The key driver of the robust numbers, of course, is the presence of Japanese-born Ohtani in the playoffs for the first time in his MLB career. Before the playoffs started, the league made that milestone a focus of its international marketing, as well as Ohtani’s historic season as MLB’s first player with 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a season.

In particular, the league constructed 113 billboards in Tokyo depicting each one of those homers and steals. Beyond Ohtani, though, the Dodgers-Padres NLDS series also featured a Game 5 pitching clash of San Diego’s Yu Darvish and Los Angeles’s Yoshinobu Yamamoto, marking the first postseason starting-pitching matchup of all Japanese-born players.

The international viewership also builds on strong U.S. results for the playoffs that have included an 18% viewership gain through the wild-card and Division Series rounds. The National League Championship Series between the Mets and Dodgers is posting the best start for that postseason round on any network since 2015, while the American League Championship Series with the Yankees and Guardians drew an average of 5.6 million viewers, up 28% from the comparable game last year and TNT Sports’ best MLB postseason figure so far this year. 

Japanese viewership from the LCS round has not yet been released, but given the Dodgers’ continued playoff march, it’s quite possible the record from the Division Series will be short-lived.

During a livestream earlier this week, Chicago Sky rookie Angel Reese revealed her WNBA salary does not cover any of her bills.

Reese, who was the No. 7 pick in the 2024 draft, made around $73,000 this season, and Caitlin Clark, the top pick of the draft, only made about $3,000 more. (It should be noted both players have substantial endorsement deals.)

The salaries of WNBA players—which go only as high as about $250,000—have been a topic of discussion for years, but have been under a spotlight this season given the unprecedented attention the league has received since the arrival of the 2024 rookie class. The current collective bargaining agreement awards just 9.3% of the league’s revenue to players, a deal signed in 2020, well before the WNBA consistently drew more than a million viewers for prime-time games. That percentage speaks to the economic realities of the league; without the coming influx of TV money, it is still losing money and subsidized by the NBA.

It comes as no surprise that the league’s players are expected to opt out of the current CBA by the Nov. 1 deadline. But even with the opt out, the current CBA rules will hold until the 2026 season—which is why Breanna Stewart has openly mentioned structuring her contracts to ensure a new deal can be made the year the CBA changes are applied.

During CBA negotiations, the players will undoubtedly look to increase their share of the league’s revenue. Their NBA counterparts receive around 50% of the league’s basketball-related income—but an increase to just 20% or 30% for the WNBA could mean exponential increases to the salary cap.

That’s before mentioning the league’s increase in revenue starting in 2026, driven by the $2.2 billion media-rights deal it secured alongside the NBA in July with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. That deal is worth $200 million annually and could rise as high as $272 million per year as more partners are secured, which would be four times as much as the league currently receives.

A revenue bump coupled with a revenue-share increase for the players could theoretically raise the salary cap far enough for max deals to land around the million-dollar-per-year mark, while minimum salaries could shift from about $64,000 to well in the six-figure range.

Seismic Shifts

However, this puts the league at risk of a severe roster construction issue.

Assuming the current salary cap doubles or even triples by 2026, every team would essentially have the flexibility to sign any available player. This could be advantageous for franchises in big markets with massive practice facilities and deep-pocketed owners like the New York Liberty or even the incoming Golden State Valkyries.

It could turn into an extreme version of what happened in the NBA in 2016, when its new media-rights deal kicked in and the salary cap increased by 35%, which is how the Warriors, coming off a 73-win season, were able to sign Kevin Durant.

The NBA added cap-smoothing to its CBA in 2020, which ensured the salary cap would only increase a maximum of 10% every year regardless of revenue increases. It may seem obvious for the WNBA to include some form of cap-smoothing—but that rule is a lot easier to swallow in the NBA where the average salary is nearly $12 million. 

In the WNBA, the league and its players will need to thread the needle to find a solution that pays players adequately but doesn’t drastically tilt the balance of power.