(Bloomberg) — While an estimated 12% of Japan’s population is watching baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani’s first World Series, one group is missing: Tokyo marketers who can’t watch the games on mobile or online. television.

In the trading floor of Deutsche Bank AG in central Tokyo, televisions are focused on financial news channels, according to an employee of the German bank. Traders also can’t access their cell phones while on the trading floor, leaving them with virtually no way to watch baseball in real time.

This is a compliance issue, intended to prevent traders from entering into unapproved trades or disclosing information, and the rules are largely the same at Mitsubishi UFJ Trust & Banking Corp. as they are at a foreign bank and at a national brokerage firm contacted by Bloomberg. But that means dealers won’t be able to watch live the showdown between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, which averaged 15.9 million viewers in Japan for Game 2, or about 12%. of the population, according to published statistics. by Major League Baseball and Fox Corp.’s sports division.

“I like baseball because I played it in high school and college, so I would like to be able to watch the World Series this time,” said Motonari Sakai, chief director of the foreign exchange and financial products division. from Mitsubishi UFJ, based in Tokyo. Trust. But Sakai said he could not watch the games on the trading floor and was anyway busy tracking the yen’s fluctuations against the dollar since elections to Japan’s lower house that saw the ruling coalition loses its majority.

The Yankees won Game 4 of the series by defeating the Dodgers, Ohtani’s team, 11-4. This is the New York team’s first victory in a best-of-seven playoff series, while rival Los Angeles has won three times. The popularity this year of Ohtani, known for his rare ability to throw and hit at an elite level, has created an economic impact in the United States and Japan of approximately 116.8 billion yen ($762 million). dollars), according to the estimates of professor emeritus Katsuhiro Miyamoto. at Kansai University.

Some traders said they resorted to checking news feeds on their financial data terminals for game updates. Others postpone watching matches until after work.

“I can’t wait to watch the sports news when I get home tonight,” Sakai said.

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