With Ohtani and World Cup Cricket, New York Has Asia’s Attention

Even for a city used to a lot of attention, New York is the focus of far more sports fans than usual as two of Asia’s biggest athletic stars–baseball’s Shohei Ohtani and cricketer Virat Kohli –compete a mere 20 miles apart.

They’re taking part in two of the most-hyped matchups of the year, with bitter rivals India and Pakistan opening Sunday morning with a T20 World Cup match on Long Island and baseball’s most glamorous franchises, the L.A. Dodgers and the New York Yankees, facing off in a possible World Series preview Sunday night. The two sporting events will see more than 80,000 people in attendance and probably more than 300 million watching broadcast feeds worldwide.

In terms of sheer numbers, nothing comes close to the interest in the matchup of India, led by batting star Virat Kohli, versus Pakistan, featuring left-handed fast bowler Mohammed Amir.  Some estimates project the global TV audience could near 400 million. India enters the game after an easy victory over Ireland while Pakistan was upset by the U.S. team, an unexpected boost to efforts to establish cricket as a mainstream sport in the country.

In The Bronx, the Dodgers, led by baseball’s highest paid player Ohtani and Japanese rookie Yoshinobu Yamamoto, rolled into town for a sold-out three game series that started Friday. Japanese compatriots, the duo are baseball’s highest paid players by virtue of their huge endorsement deals. They bring an even bigger spotlight to what are already widely watched games between baseball’s two glamor franchises.

The T20 World Cup in the United States is “really monumental thing for cricket in the United States,” said Paraag Marathe, president of 49ers Enterprises and a long-time volunteer booster of cricket in the country. Just being able to host 16 matches in the biennial ICC T20 World Cup in New York, Dallas and Florida is a boon for the sport, according to Marathe, speaking on a phone call before the U.S.-Pakistan match. “Just to plant a flag here in the U.S. is so important, because we are the largest media market in the world and this is the second largest sport in the world. There are so many cricket enthusiasts in the U.S., and there is the potential for these nascent seeds to grow into something really special.”

The U.S. is co-hosting the World Cup with half-a-dozen nation countries of the West Indies, having built a temporary 34,000-seat stadium in Eisenhower Park, a 930-acre park in the middle of Nassau County’s thickly settled patchwork of homes and corporate campuses. As of Saturday night a few tickets as part of official $10,000 VIP packages were still available to India-Pakistan.

T20 cricket in particular is a version of the sport more likely to appeal to American tastes–a match takes about 2.5 to three hours, the same length as the average MLB game. T20 was developed in the U.K. in 2003 to modernize the game and has become popular enough that a second season of T20 pro league Major League Cricket will be held in the U.S. this year. The league boasts investors like Ross Perot, Jr. and Bollywood legend Shah Rukh Khan. “It’s a huge opportunity for the country to embrace cricket, and I think for the cricket players, for an opportunity to see how passionate and enthusiastic Americans are about cricket,” said WillowTV Chief Operating Officer Todd Myers on a video call.

Willow is a U.S. and Canada channel dedicated to cricket, and Myers says demand to reach the estimated five million Indian subcontinent ex-pats living in the country has been very strong from advertisers. “This highly valuable South Asian demographic is educated and has a lot of disposable income … We reach more of the South Asian audience than anyone else in this country,” thanks to cricket, he said.

Not all has gone off without a hitch–the condition of the fields on Long Island was criticized by the ICC in a media release: “The pitches used so far … have not played as consistently as we would have all wanted.” Fans believe the games haven’t gone as expected in part due to field conditions.

The Yankees also aren’t seeing their games go quite as planned a few miles east in The Bronx, losing the first two games to the Dodgers 2-1 and 11-3.

The move over the winter of Ohtani to the Dodgers from the Angels and the addition of Yamamoto from the Nippon Professional Baseball league have supercharged TV ratings domestically and in Japan, according to MLB. Ratings on Japan’s NHK network now up 140% for this season compared to 2018, Ohtani’s first season in the U.S. The average television audience for Yamamoto, who started Friday night’s  Dodgers win, is 18% greater than other Dodger games, says MLB. Domestically, Dodgers-Yankees games typically far outdraw TV viewers compared to other MLB games. YES, the Yankees New York area broadcaster, said in a tweet Saturday that Friday night’s game was its most watched in over a year, and its best Friday game in two years.

Ohtani has yet to make much of an impression this weekend, with just one single in nine at-bats over the first two games, the lone hit coming during the Dodger blowout Saturday night. Sunday night’s game offers another chance at living up to the hype, when Ohtani and the Dodgers face off against Luis Gil, a rookie pitching sensation for the Bombers who has recorded seven straight starts of at least six innings with one run or fewer allowed. The last rookie to do that was Dodgers phenom Fernando Valenzuela, who led L.A. to the 1981 World Series against the Yankees that year.