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Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers greets fans while it leaves the field after the MLB Tokyo opening series between Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago puppies in Tokyo Dome on March 19, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.
Gene Wang | Getty images
On the morning of the second and last game of the Tokyo series of the Major Leagues of Békico between the Chicago puppies and the Los Angeles Dodgers on March 19, a snow powder fell in the capital city of Japan, an extremely rare occurrence for a time of year better known by the flowers of the Cerez Flower.
But that did not dissuade more than a thousand people to align to buy at the MLB store of 31,100 square feet that operate with fans outside the Tokyo dome when it opened that morning.
That is a reflection of the type of impact that Shohei Ohtani is having on the MLB business in Japan, an impact that has only grown in size since he signed a 10 -year 10 -year professional sports record, $ 700 million with the contract with the Dodgers in December 2023, after that with the first homer of MLB, 50 saucepan and 50 season, in addition to winning both the MVP of the National League of the National League. A world series.
Last year, Fanatics, which operates the MLB merchandise business worldwide, saw a 170% increase in merchandise sales of MLB year after year in Japan, according to Nori Kawana, managing director of Eastern Asia fans. In the last five years, Ohtani merchandise has represented 57% of all MLB sales in the MLB Japan and Fanatics Japan store, while the sales of merchandise from the Dodgers have increased more than 2,000% year after year since it signed with the team, Kawana said.
Japan has a deep baseball history and is the most popular sport in the country for spectators and participants. MLB has also had a long connection with the country, which dates back to the Barnstorming games that saw players like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play in exhibition games in Japan with the now deeper relationship between MLB and Nippon Professional Baseball.
Noah Garden, an attached business and media commissioner of the MLB, said that Japan is, with much, the largest commercial market of the league outside the United States and Canada, something that attributes to these long -term investments.
“It simply does not happen overnight,” Garden said. However, he added: “And then you have this talent at once in life.”
Garden said that when MLB looks around the world, “business things usually stay behind the fandom for some ticks.”
In Japan, where MLB is “scratching the surface,” Garden said, “the opportunities are exploding.”
This year’s Tokyo series game was observed by 25 million viewers in Japan, according to MLB, establishing a new record for the best -selling game in the country: the population of Japan is approximately 125 million. The second game averaged more than 23 million viewers.
Although it is not an exact comparison of apples to apples, the World Dodgers-New York Yankees 2024 averaged 15.8 million viewers in the United States (and 12.1 million in Japan where the games began in the morning).
MLB plans to feed that growing fans base in Japan with content. The League has long had an office in the country, and recently expanded its original and translated Japanese content for the MLB and MLB.com application. He is also adding a newsletter and a content center that follows the players born in Japanese. In addition to updating your MLB Gameday product, which provides monitoring of advanced games and statistics, to be in Japanese.
Fans pose for photographs before the baseball game between Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago puppies in the MLB Tokyo series outside the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo on March 18, 2025.
Yuichi Yamazaki |
Garden said that a growing hearing is changing the way in which the League is thinking about its next media rights contract, with its international and national agreements that expire after the 2028 season. “When the next set of offers is completed, you will find people looking for world rights, especially serpentine,” Garden said. “The number of related people and seeing the game internationally, I think it has opened everyone’s eyes.”
For the Tokyo series, the games were transmitted locally in NTV by air, as well as broadcast on Amazon Prime.
That also moves to sponsorships, Garden said, and American companies see the opportunity to break into the Japanese market, while Japanese companies can not only do things with MLB now at the local level, but also communicate with US consumers. In the last two years, MLB has signed 14 new sponsors in Japan, and the Tokyo series was the largest international sponsorship event in the League, generating a 240% increase in income compared to the Seoul series of 2024 plays in Seoul, South Korea.
“We are benefiting from all that kind of convergence at the same time,” Garden said.
Garden said the league expects the Tokyo series to be “the most successful international game we have made financially.”
The two games between the puppies and the Dodgers were sold snapshots, in addition to the exhibition games held between the MLB teams and the local Japanese games. The demand was so high that the games were broadcast in approximately 150 movie theaters in Japan.
The Tokyo series recorded the best merchandise sales of any international MLB event, with sales that eclipsan the 2024 London series in 320%, MLB said. Sales in the store at Tokyo Dome exceeded MLB All-Star, selling more than half a million products. As expected, the most popular article was an Ohtani shirt with the Tokyo series patch.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred He told New York Times That he expects the Tokyo series to establish records in all areas for a special league event, and could generate more than $ 35 million. However, he said that the broader objective is to grow the total league business there: “We believe there are payments in the B: billions,” Manfred told The Times.
Connecting Japanese fans with all MLB players, teams
Justin Turner #3 of Chicago puppies poses with young fans who wear a false beard before the game against Yomiuri giants in Tokyo Dome on March 16, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.
Kenta Harada | Getty images sport | Getty images
This growth will only continue as Ohtani, along with other players born in Japanese such as Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto de los Dodgers, and the Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki of the puppies, continue to have an impact on MLB. But the challenge for MLB and its partners to achieve that high goal is to build the rest of the league players in Japan as well.
David Leiner, president of Carding Cards for Collectible Fanatics, where he supervises Topps, said the Fandom around baseball in Japan is undeniable, with much support not only for the stars of the Japanese MLB but also for local NPB teams.
Topps has turned his business into the eight figures in the country, Leiner said, “with Ohtani spraying a little accelerant in growth.”
The company also has licenses for Japanese baseball and football leagues, as well as other entertainment properties, and Leiner said Fanatics sees the potential for the market to generate more than nine figures.
Japanese baseball card collectors are not very different from Americans, Leiner said, but one of the significant differences is how much they seek to support their country’s players. “Do you want the Derek Jeter (card) or Mike Trout (card)? Of course, but they lean a little more towards Japanese players in MLB, and there is a lot of pride in that,” he said.
Leiner said that leads to the Fandom of the teams in which Japanese players played, and that stays with time, for example, there is a contingent of the Seattle Mariners fans in Japan due to the time of Ichiro Suzuki with the team. But there are other examples of being a fleeting phenomenon, since Japanese fans went to a player and then stopped following up when that player left MLB. Now, the growth of Japanese players and their impact within the league is helping to build a broader fandom for the MLB.
Last season, there were 10 players born in Japanese on the MLB lists on the day of the inauguration, most since 2013 when there was 11. While that follows significantly some of the other countries represented in the League, such as the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, which had 108 and 58 players in the opening lists, respectively, few countries can match the star power of the current group of Japanese players. MLB has not yet required that the teams finish the chart lists 2025, but the number of Japanese players is expected to grow.
Kawana, who has its headquarters in Tokyo, said that, although Japanese fans have historically focused on the players’ fandom, they are now seeing a growth in the team’s Fandom, especially because it has become easier to follow those teams.
Having MLB equipment on the ground has not hurt either. Before this year, the last time MLB played official games in Japan was in 2019, and Garden said the league hopes that when he agrees with his new CBA, he will expire in 2026, he will come with “an even bigger plan.”
MLB will organize a list of games in Monterrey, Mexico, at the end of this month.
“This kind of thing is years in process, and it takes a long time to the youth level until really mature,” Garden said. “You are seeing the culmination of it now, and this should mark the beginning of a new era of prosperity for MLB and baseball in Asia.”
