The World Baseball Classic -- returning for the first time in six years -- will soon be playing out its quarterfinals matchups, but can already take pride in its first-round slate of games, which was the most attended in WBC history.
On Friday, MLB announced that the various first-round matchups played in Tokyo, Taichung, Phoenix, and Miami had destroyed the previous attendance records for first-round games in the exhibition tournament.
Per MLB, a whopping 1,010,999 fans attended the opening round of the tournament. The number is more than double the previous record of 510,056 set in 2017 (h/t Yahoo Sports).
Breaking it down further, Japan saw the strongest demand as the Tokyo Dome averaged 36,198 per game, and 361,976 total fans for this year’s World Baseball Classic. Both are new records for the event. The set of WBC games in Miami, meanwhile, have pulled in 295,850 attendees — a record for the event in the United States — while the Mexico-USA matchup in Phoenix set a single-game WBC record with 47,534 in attendance.
Quarterfinal games in the 2023 WBC are being held this week, while semifinal matchups are scheduled to begin on March 19. The finals of this year’s WBC will be held on March 21 at LoanDepot Park in Miami.
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