By Chris Williams: In a likely effort to help drum up some badly needed publicity for his November 22nd HBO pay-per-view fight against Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KOs), WBO welterweight strap holder Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) will be throwing out the first pitch at Dodgers Stadium today for the Dodgers vs. Nationals game.
The game starts 5:00 p.m. PT. Pacquiao did the same thing for the San Francisco Giants vs. Milwaukee Brewers game last Friday at AT&T Park in San Francisco, California. Whether all this throwing out of the first pitches will help generate any additional pay-per-view sales is unclear.
There’s still quite a bit of time before Pacquiao’s November 22nd fight against Algieri, so Arum might want to see if he can shuttle Pacquiao around to various ballparks to throw out more pitches. If he gets around to all of the teams in the Major Leagues before November 22nd, I can see some of the fans purchasing the fight on PPV.
From my perspective, I’m not sure that it’s going to work. We’re talking baseball fans here, not boxing fans. Pacquiao might be better off being introduced at different boxing fights that occur around the globe in the coming months. That might be the better way to get boxing fans interested in the Pacquiao-Algieri fight.
The danger with Pacquiao throwing pitches at baseball games is that he could potentially hurt his arm. If someone’s not used to throwing a baseball in front 40,000+ fans, there’s a potential there for them to get hurt.
I don’t know that the Pacquiao-Algieri fight is going to be a huge success on PPV, because it involves a fighter that boxing fans aren’t familiar with in Algieri. In addition to that, Pacquiao and Algieri have been playing it nice with each other on their press tour, so there’s zero friction at all between them.
You can’t even count on the fight being sold on trash talking, because it’s not being done. Pacquiao and Algieri look like long lost buddies each time they get on the stage together, as they say a lot of nice things about each other. I haven’t seen such a dull build up since when Pacquiao fought Joshua Clottey in 2010.
Clottey just looked like he was happy to be there, and I can’t remember one harsh word said between them. The fight brought in just 660,000 PPV buys, which back then was an incredibly low number given that Pacquiao’s fights where routinely pulling in over 1 million buys.
I imagine Bob Arum of Top Rank would be pleased if the Pacquiao-Algieri fight brought in 660,000 PPV buys. That’s a good number now for Pacquiao, but I don’t see it happening unless Arum does something drastic like putting a great undercard with the fight. Since I don’t see that happening, I think Arum should look to get Pacquiao out in the public as much as possible, be it at baseball games, NFL games, U.S political events, or whatever,
Comments are closed.