Potential Baseball Fan Engagement: The Determinants of a New Television Audience in the Chinese Professional Baseball League during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in baseball viewership, thereby providing an opportunity to comprehensively explore the determinants of the new audience. To this end, we analyze the preferences of the Taiwanese audience in 2019 and 2020, both before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, through TV ratings based on the effect of outcome uncertainty, tournament factors, consumer availability, and game quality. The empirical findings show that the behavior of the small-scale Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) sports television viewing market differs from that of large-scale markets such as Major League Baseball. Additionally, the effect of the outcome uncertainty of the game is inconsistent before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. New audiences, unlike existing audiences, have been affected by team quality and consumer availability that are statistically significant, but tournament factors are not significant. This study provides the first empirical analysis of the factors driving TV ratings of CPBL games as well as the impact before and after the COVID-19 outbreak as a contribution to filling the gap in sports communication research. The observations can be used by strategic departments of professional teams for their marketing target, to identify potential fans, and to direct their marketing resources towards sustaining or even growing during the pandemic events