Creating New Strategies for the Changing Sports Business : The Case of Nippon Professional Baseball

摘要

Baseball is a popular sport mainly in Japan, Asia, and the United States, and over the past five years, Japanese baseball teams have made significant changes to the way business strategies are created. They brought content from major league baseball fields and created new content in home stadiums such as Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds in case of Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. The content to the home stadium they are working hard to create content that will entertain us every day. However, the size of the Japanese and Western sports markets is very different now. The reason is that Europe and America have better ideas than Japan and have a wide range of uses other than sports. In particular, there is income and investment from the private sector and various facilities and equipment, but Japan is limited. We were wondering what impact this changing sports business would have on viewers. Reach different elements such as date, time, event, present, game situation. Using the open data on the official website of the Japanese baseball team and the historical weather data on the weather site, we investigated the effect of the number of spectators on the event factors. This study used random forest analysis and correspondence analysis. Traditionally, multiple regression analysis has been used to determine the effect of audience size, but there is an error between the predicted and actual measurements. Therefore, we adopted a classification method performed in the random forest. This is an ensemble learning algorithm that integrates weak learners to improve generalization ability, since the main influence is on the number of spectators, which is a sports business, there is a problem that an error appears between the predicted value and the actually measured value. Since the number of people that can actually be accommodated at baseball stadiums in Japan varies between large and small stadiums, the spectator mobilization is based on an analysis using a random forest by calculating the seat occupancy rate based on the average number of spectators/capacity. Since the factor that increases the number can be calculated, it can also be used in sports other than baseball in the future. Furthermore, because it is possible to see the impact on popularity due to event details in the correspondence analysis, it is possible to derive a new sports business idea.