Sho-Time: TK million Japanese fans tuned in to see Shohei Ohtani hit his first postseason home run in Game 5 of the NLDS.

Baseball has long been known as America’s pastime, but during the 2024 MLB playoffs, the United States is not even home to the sport’s biggest audience.

Friday’s decisive NLDS Game 5 between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres drew the largest television audience in the U.S. for a division series game since 2017, with an average of 7.24 million viewers on Fox. But in baseball-mad Japan—where Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani is a national hero—the same game averaged 12.9 million viewers.

That viewership accounts for 19.2% of households in Japan, a higher share than any non-NFL programming in the U.S. and on par with a prime-time Monday Night Football game, despite beginning at 9 a.m. Tokyo time on Saturday.

Japan has been an important international market for MLB for decades. Detsu, the Tokyo-based advertising giant that has controlled the rights to linear distribution in the country since 1990, is the league’s longest-standing international media partner. Digital rights are controlled by South Korea-based Eclat Media Group, and the two........

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