GLENDALE, Ariz. – Seiko Watanabe stood along the path to the baseball fields at the Los Angeles Dodgers' spring training facility on a recent weekday morning, wearing a store-bought white Shohei Ohtani jersey of the team a day before. He kept one eye on his 6-year-old son, dressed in a Dodgers cap, a Dodgers glove and a blue Dodgers shirt with Ohtani's No. 17 on the back, and the other on a nearby door where he normally the players come out. .
Two days earlier, Watanabe had flown nearly 6,000 miles from his Japanese hometown of Yokohama in hopes of simply catching a glimpse of Ohtani, with no guarantee of an autograph or even an interaction.
“I just want to see it,” he said. “That is my dream.”
Twelve months ago, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman sat in the stands in Miyazaki, Japan, watching the Japanese national team practice for the World Baseball Classic and thought about people like Watanabe. He was impressed by the thousands of fans in attendance, but also by how his loyalties were divided among a half-dozen Major League Baseball teams. He imagined them all wearing Dodger gear. That image stayed with Friedman and his lieutenants throughout 2023, and helped prompt them to allocate more than $1 billion for Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
“I think the passion for baseball is as strong or stronger than any other country in the world,” Friedman said. “And so, in an ideal world, in the next five to 10 years, we will have kids growing up as Dodger fans.”
The Dodgers have yet to play their first game of 2024 — that will happen Thursday, in an exhibition game against the division rival San Diego Padres at 3:10 p.m. ET on ESPN — but their position as the team predominance of MLB Japan is already becoming clear.
Dodgers brand wine has been sold in liquor stores in Japan; Japanese publications have anticipated the Dodgers' upcoming season as closely as they would any local team; and former Dodgers pitcher Hideo Nomo's iconic No. 16 jersey. has been popping up all over Camelback Ranch, the spring training home of the Dodgers. In the two-month span between Ohtani's free agent decision and Super Bowl Sunday, the Dodgers were searched on Google twice as often in Japan as in the United States.
“Every day you see news about the Dodgers, Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto,” Watanabe said. “All the channels. All the evening news, you see.”
About a dozen Japanese photographers and videographers have been stationed outside the Dodgers facility each morning shortly after dawn, hoping to capture Ohtani and Yamamoto as they drive toward the players' parking lot. Ohtani's first interview session, on February 9, was attended by about 70 accredited media members. Later that afternoon, at least that many people stood by a rope to watch Yamamoto, Nippon Professional Baseball's Most Valuable Player for three straight years, warm up with fellow Dodgers starter Walker Buehler.
“Obviously baseball is treated differently than other sports, and when you have the personalities and the following that those two guys have, it becomes a little more like a football Sunday every day,” Buehler said. “I think it's fantastic for us as a team, fantastic for a lot of the guys on our team who will get more attention for what they do and also for our team. You can go back to the World Baseball Classic and the coverage and the energy and the vibe that it generates. I think it's good that the game is covered in this way.
The Dodgers gained a foothold in Japan in the mid-1990s, when Nomomania swept through Los Angeles. Nomo won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1995 and finished in the top five in Cy Young voting for the second consecutive time the following year. He faded away soon after, but his presence and skill spawned a generation of people in Japan who would grow up to become Dodger fans.
Since then, Japan's biggest stars — Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Yu Darvish and Daisuke Matsuzaka, not to mention Ohtani when he first arrived in the big leagues in 2017 — have signed elsewhere. But with this winter's moves, the Dodgers regained their title as Japan's team, at least in the mind of Scott Okamoto, a lifelong Angeleno who has followed the Dodgers since the 1970s.
A little less than two years ago, Okamoto started a podcast, “Asians in Baseball,” about Asian representation in the major leagues, alongside Kim Cooper and Naomi Ko, two women in their 30s who discovered the sport through the hubbub in Chicago. The Cubs' World Series title in 2016 and fell in love with it while watching Ohtani establish himself as a two-way star in 2021. Ohtani's influence in Japan in the 2020s evokes Michael Jordan's imprint on the culture American in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Everyone, from your 90-year-old grandmother to your young son, has heard the name Ohtani in Japan,” Okamoto said. “It's that ubiquitous.”
Ohtani's introductory press conference on December 14 was broadcast by five different networks in Japan and attracted a global audience of 70 million people. His Dodgers jersey set a Fanatics record for sales within the first 48 hours of its release, breaking a mark previously held by soccer star Lionel Messi when he joined Inter Miami.
The Dodgers, who do not provide details on ticket sales, will almost certainly reach the 4 million attendance mark for the first time this season. The Angels, sources said, earned about $20 million annually in additional sponsorship and marketing revenue while employing Ohtani over the past six years, and league sources expect the Dodgers (a much more global brand to boot) will take a liking to him. go significantly better. The immediate tangible benefits are obvious. What's harder to understand is what this will mean in the long term.
“I don't think we understand the magnitude of this,” Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said.
Perhaps Rōki Sasaki, the 22-year-old Japanese pitching sensation that the Dodgers and 29 other teams are salivating over, will give Los Angeles priority when they release him in the near future. Perhaps the generation that follows him will do the same, having grown up in an era when his idols wore Dodger Blue.
“I certainly think that had to be part of the calculation,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was born in Okinawa, Japan.
“We've talked a lot over the years about doing everything we can to be a destination place, where our own players don't want to leave, where players from other teams look longingly at the Dodgers and want to play there,” he said. Friedman. “And to the extent that that can extend to the elite players who will be playing in the NPB for the next 15 or 20 years, that's even better.”
