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 entities sublicense games out to nine different distribution channels, including the public broadcaster NHK General TV, which aired the Dodgers-Padres series.

Combined, they pay MLB an estimated $64 million per year, according to the research firm Omdia, which accounts for about one-third of all international rights collected by MLB. Meanwhile, the domestic media rights deals with ESPN, Fox and TNT pay MLB more than $1.7 billion per year, and Apple has a separate package worth $85 million annually.

International revenues are distributed evenly across MLB’s 30 teams, coming to just over $2 million each, despite interest in the country centering on one team and specifically one player: Ohtani.

The 30-year-old slugger—who signed a 10-year, $700 million contract to play for the Dodgers in December—has already delivered on his record contract. The two-time American League MVP is a lock to win his first MVP in the National League, following his record-setting season in which he became baseball’s first 50/50 player by ringing up 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases. He is also a global marketing superstar, endorsing everything from pharmaceuticals company Kowa to watch brand Seiko and the fashion brand Boss (formerly Hugo Boss). Forbes estimates Ohtani earned $60 million this year off the field, and another $2 million on it as part of his heavily deferred contract.

That makes Ohtani the highest-paid player in baseball this season, and just behind him at $59 million in total earnings is his Dodgers teammate Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a Japanese pitcher. The 26-year-old right hander made the move from Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league to MLB before this season, joining the Dodgers on a 12-year, $325 million deal.

Last week’s Game 5 was something of a perfect storm for Japanese baseball fans, with Yamamoto pitching for the Dodgers against another Japanese baseball legend, 38-year-old Yu Darvish of the Padres.

But it wasn’t a one-off phenomenon. Game 1 of the Dodgers-Padres series, which aired at 9 a.m. local time the previous Sunday, captured nearly nine million viewers on NHK G, or 13.6% of households. Already, that was double the viewership of the most-watched regular-season game of 2024 in Japan, and comparable to Ichiro Suzuki’s farewell game in 2019, which was broadcast in prime time. MLB also reported a 336% increase in web traffic from Japan around the game.

Still, as impressive as the MLB figures have been, they pale in comparison with viewership of last year’s World Baseball Classic. Six of the seven games played by Japan’s national team drew more than 30 million viewers in the country, and the outlier drew a mere 29 million viewers early on a weekday morning. All of Japan’s games drew more than a 40% household share, comparable to NFL playoff games in the United States, not counting the Super Bowl.

“So far the playoffs do not have as strong impact as the last WBC Japanese games had yet,” says Toshi Ogura, a professor of sports business at Chuogakuin University in Chiba, Japan. “We will see how the future playoff games develop if the Dodgers keep winning and Ohtani performs.”

There’s no reason to expect the interest won’t continue to build. In Game 1 the Dodgers’ current National League Championship Series, they faced New York Mets pitcher Kodai Senga, also from Japan, who is expected to pitch again in the series, as is Yamamoto. Looming in the World Series could be the New York Yankees and Aaron Judge, a matchup that would make TV network executives on both sides of the Pacific salivate.