Matt Calkins: NFL still reigns supreme, but baseball is rapidly ascending across the globe

Matt Calkins, The Seattle Times on Mar 23, 2026

Published in Football

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SEATTLE — It might no longer feel like our official pastime, but we are in the midst of some of the sports' best times.

The NFL still reigns supreme in this country — and that rule isn't limited to the season of play. But baseball is rising with the zip of a four-seamer with three-digit speed.

The championship game of the World Baseball Classic between the U.S. and Venezuela? It drew more than 10.7 million viewers — making it the most-watched game in tournament history. That number was more than double the 4.48 million that watched the U.S. vs. Japan in the 2023 final.

And this doesn't feel like an outlier. It's representative of an increasing number of eyeballs seeing international competition as well.

After all, it wasn't just this past WBC — which averaged nearly 1.3 million viewers across Fox, FS1 and FS2 — that drew a mammoth audience. The 2025 World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays averaged 34 million viewers globally, the largest audience for a World Series since 1992. Game 7, meanwhile, brought in 51 million worldwide viewers, the largest for a WS game since 1991.

If you're wondering, the 15.4 million viewers World Series games averaged domestically fried that of the NBA Finals, which averaged 10.27 million viewers. That isn't meant as an attempt to humiliate the hoopers — but rather to say that the stick-and-ballers have rediscovered their groove.

So what's going on exactly? An array of factors. The first being that the visibility of baseball has been driven up exponentially due to the presence of one Shohei Ohtani — the Japanese star for the Dodgers who might be the most talented player to ever suit up.

MLB essentially has a Michael Jordan now. He comes in the form of a four-time MVP who, when healthy, is a top-two hitter and top-10 pitcher playing for a two-time defending world champion in a monster market. You stop when he's at the plate. You count down to his next starting pitching attempt. The man earned $70 million a year on the field and $125 million off the field last year.

Ohtani didn't play in the WBC final, obviously. But like Caitlin Clark did for NCAA hoops and the WNBA, his allure raises the profile of everyone in the league.

Of course, there are other stars doing things we haven't seen in ages. New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge has managed an OPS above 1.111 in three of four years. That's absurd. I mentioned that Ohtani is a top-two hitter. Judge might go down as the best clean hitter in two or three generations. Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, meanwhile, just bashed 60 home runs despite spending most the season squatting behind home plate.

For years, Angels outfielder Mike Trout was considered to be the best in the game by a healthy margin. But he didn't have the commercial appeal of the aforementioned trio.

There is the pitch clock, too. This, frankly, was one of the most significant and beneficial rule changes to the game we've ever seen. No longer are games a guaranteed 3-hour-and-15-minute slog. A pitchers' duel can be over in 2 hours and 15 minutes. A high-scoring affair can still break the three-hour mark.

It's not that fans don't want to soak in all the delight that watching or attending a ballgame can bring. But a good chunk of the fat has been cut between every piece of action. That's game-changing.

Of course, it didn't hurt that the WBC had some of the more riveting games we've seen in the tournament's history — all accompanied by a mixture of drama and joy that filled the headlines in an otherwise quiet part of the sports calendar. People were intrigued, and patriotism generated by the U.S. men's and women's hockey gold medals in the Olympics less than a month earlier likely had some spillover.

I realize not everything that came out of the WBC was heartwarming for local and national fans alike. The Raleigh-Randy Arozarena handshake situation rankled many around here for various reasons — as did Raleigh being benched in the final. And the fact that the U.S. ultimately lost to Venezuela, 3-2, in the final was an unsatisfying result.

There is also the very real disparity between the rich teams (particularly the Dodgers) and the rest of the league that is skewing the balance of power.

Even so, baseball is in a good place.

We're now less than a week away from opening day, and you can bet Mariners fans are thrilled. Their team is constructed in a way that a trip to their first World Series is essentially the expectation.

It's not just the hometown team that is set up for success, though — it's the whole league.

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