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Abstract
This article investigates the effects of patriotism and Asian regionalism on game attendance and television viewers by using World Baseball Classic match data. The micro data of TV ratings provides comprehensive insights into the behavior of TV viewers. The results imply that attendance and TV viewers are affected by patriotism and Asian regionalism. Patriotism and regionalism have a significant positive effect on TV ratings. Although total points scored and game uncertainty are not significantly related to attendance and TV ratings in the game-level analysis, total points scored are significantly positively related to TV ratings in the inning-level analysis. Coefficients of inning-level uncertainty are partially negatively related to Videoland Sport's TV rating. The evidence weakly supports the hypothesis of game uncertainty.
Notes
1In a baseball game, a game is played between two teams that take turns playing offense (batting) and defense (pitching or fielding). A pair of turns by each team constitutes an inning. A game normally consists of nine innings. Inning uncertainty refers to the degree of uncertainty that is made up of the relative capabilities of two teams that are competing to win a game in an inning.
2Between 1969 and 1991, Taiwan qualified for the Little League, Senior and Big League World Championships 22, 20 and 18 times, respectively, and won the titles 13, 17, and 13 times, respectively.
3After a 3-year gap between the first two installments of the tournament, plans call for the World Baseball Classic to be repeated every four years following the 2009 event, with the third installment of the Classic to occur in 2013.
4For example, games were televised on TV Asahi in Japan. Except for Taiwan, no other countries had access to Videoland Max and Videoland Sport at that time, and thus the variation in the TV rating was not influenced by fans in other countries. This makes it possible to analyze the effects of patriotism and regionalism on TV ratings in Taiwan.
5In the first round, Pool A played at the Tokyo Dome, Pool B played in Mexico City, Pool C played at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, and Pool D played in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the second round, Pool 1 games were to be at Petco Park in San Diego, and Pool 2 games were to be at the Dolphin Stadium in suburban Miami. The semifinals and finals were scheduled to be held at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
6The ratings are households watching TV.
7The website of the MLB is http://www.mlb.com/wbc/2009/schedule/.
8A double-elimination tournament is used in the WBC games. The Taiwanese team lost two games and was out of the tournament in the first round, and so the observations were limited. An effective solution is to extend the dataset. However, the observations for WBC 2006 were not available and WBC 2013 has not yet occurred. Fortunately, the observations for TV ratings normally extend one game into nine innings. The data expansion at the inning level can partially fix this limitation.
9Robust standard errors using the Huber-White sandwich estimators made the middle of the night dummy (DMid) significant in Model 14 of .
1*** denotes significance at the 1% level;
** denotes significance at the 5% level; and
* denotes significance at the 10% level.
2 denotes significance at the 10% level.
3 p values are listed in the Breusch-Pagan test.
*** denotes significance at the 1% level;
** denotes significance at the 5% level; and
* denotes significance at the 10% level.
Values in parentheses are standard errors.
p values are listed in the Breusch-Pagan test.
*** denotes significance at the 1% level;
** denotes significance at the 5% level; and
*denotes significance at the 10% level.
Values in parentheses are standard errors.
p values are listed in the Breusch-Pagan test.