Shohei Ohtani # 17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers becks up for fans while leaving the field after the opening series of the MLB Tokyo between Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs at Tokyo Dome on March 19, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.
Gene Wang | Getty Images
On the morning of the second and last match of the Tokyo series of Major League Baseball between the Cubs of Chicago and the Los Angeles Dodgers on March 19, a snow sprinkling fell on the Japanese capital – an extremely rare event for an increasingly known period for cherry flowers.
But that has not dissuaded more than a thousand people to queue to shop in the MLB store made from fanatics of 31100 square feet outside the Tokyo Dome when it opened that morning.
This is the reflection of the type of impact that Shohei Ohtani has on MLB’s affairs in Japan, an impact that has only become a size since it signed a 10 -year sports record, of $ 700 million with the Dodgers, then in December 2023, following the National League MLB, 50 world titles and 50 titles in the world series.
Last year, fanatics, which operates the MLB goods company worldwide, saw a 170% increase in sales of MLB goods from one year to Japan, according to Nori Kawana, director general of Eastern Fanatics. Over the past five years, Ohtani -related goods have represented 57% of all MLB sales in the MLB Japan and Fanatics Japan store, while Dodgers goods sales have increased by more than 2,000% from one year since he signed with the team, said Kawana.
Japan has a deep history of baseball and is the most popular sport in the country for spectators and participants. MLB also had a long connection with the country, going back to Barnstorming Games who 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, deputy business and media commissioner of the MLB, said Japan was by far the largest commercial market in the League outside the United States and Canada, which it attributes to these long-term investments.
“It just doesn’t happen overnight,” said Garden. However, he added: “And then you have this talent on a life.”
Garden said that when MLB looks around the world, “commercial affairs are generally late on the fandom by a few ticks.”
In Japan, where the MLB “scratches the surface,” said Garden, “the opportunities explode”.
This year’s tokyo series’s first game was watched by 25 million viewers in Japan, according to MLB, establishing a new record for the country’s most watched game – the Japanese population is around 125 million. The second match has reached an average of more than 23 million viewers.
Although this is not an exact comparison of apples and appliance, Dodgers-New York Yankees 2024 World Series have an average of 15.8 million viewers in the United States (and 12.1 million in Japan where games started in the morning).
MLB plans to feed this growing fans base in Japan with content. The league has long been an office in the country and has recently expanded its original Japanese content and translated for the mlb application and on mlb.com. He also adds a newsletter and a content center that follows players born in Japanese. In addition to updating its Gameday MLB product, which provides game follow -up and advanced statistics, to be in Japanese.
Fans appear to photographs before the baseball match between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs in the MLB Tokyo series outside Tokyo Dome in Tokyo on March 18, 2025.
Yuichi Yamazaki | AFP | Getty Images
Garden said that an increasing public changing the way the League is thinking about its next media rights contract, its international and national transactions expiring after the 2028 season. “When the next series of offers is in place, you will find people who are looking for global rights, especially banks,” said Garden. “The number of people who are committed and watching the game internationally, I think, has opened everyone’s eyes.”
For the Tokyo series, the games were broadcast locally on NTV live, as well as broadcast on Amazon Prime.
This also behaves for sponsorship, said Garden, American companies seeing an opportunity to break into the Japanese market while Japanese companies can not only do things with the MLB now locally, but also reach American consumers. Over the past two years, MLB has signed 14 new sponsors in Japan, and the Tokyo series has been the largest international sponsorship event, generating a 240% increase in income compared to the 2024 Seoul series played in Seoul, South Korea.
“We benefit from all this kind of convergence at the same time,” said Garden.
Garden said the League expects the Tokyo series to be “the most successful international game we have done financially”.
The two games between the Cubs and the Dodgers were instant sales, 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 around 150 cinemas in Japan.
The Tokyo series has recorded the best sales of goods from any international MLB event, with sales eclipping the 2024 London series of 320%, said MLB. Sales of the Tokyo Dome store have exceeded MLB stars every week, selling more than half a million products. Unsurprisingly, the most popular element was an Ohtani jersey with the Patch of the Tokyo series.
Commissioner MLB ROB Manfred said to the New York Times that it expects the Tokyo series to establish records at all levels for a special league event and could bring more than $ 35 million. However, he said that the more important goal was to develop the total league affairs there: “We think there are gains in B: billions,” Manfred told Times.
Connect Japanese fans to all MLB players, teams
Justin Turner # 3 of Chicago Cubs poses with young fans who wear a false beard before the match against the giants of Yomiuri in Tokyo Dome on March 16, 2025 in Tokyo, in Japan.
Kenta Harada | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images
This growth will only continue Ohtani, alongside other players of Japanese origin such as Dodgers, Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and the Shota Imanaga des Cubs and Seiya Suzuki, continue to have an impact in the MLB. But the challenge for MLB and its partners to achieve this high goal is also to constitute the rest of the league players in Japan.
David Leiner, president of commercial cards against collectibles of fanatics, where he oversees topps, said that the Fandom around Baseball in Japan is undeniable, with great support not only for Japanese MLB stars, but also local NPB teams.
Topps has developed its activities in eight figures in the country, said Leiner, “with Ohtani, sprinkling a little accelerator in growth”.
The company also holds the licenses for Japanese baseball and football leagues, as well as other entertainment properties, and Leiner said that fanatics come the potential for the market to generate more than nine figures.
Japanese baseball cards collectors are not very different from Americans, said Leiner, but one of the important differences is how they seek to support players in their country. “Do they want the derek throwing [card] or Mike Trout [card]? Of course, but they lean a little more to the Japanese MLB players, and there is a lot of pride in there, “he said.
Leiner said it was leading to the team fandom on which Japanese players have played, and who sticks over time – for example, there is a contingent of Seattle Marine Fans in Japan due to the time of Ichiro Suzuki with the team. But there are other examples of it is an ephemeral phenomenon, while Japanese fans flocked to a player, then stopped as closely when this player left the MLB. Now, the growth of Japanese players and their impact within the League helps to build a wider fandom for the MLB.
Last season, there were 10 players born in Japanese on the MLB lists on the day of opening, the most since 2013, when there were 11. Although this considerably tracks some of the other countries represented in the League, such as the Dominican Republic and Venezuela – which had 108 and 58 players on the lists of the opening day, respectively – little countries can match the Star Power of Japanese players. The MLB has not yet forced teams to finalize 2025 lists of the opening day, but the number of Japanese players should grow.
Kawana, who is based in Tokyo, said that even if Japanese fans had historically been focused on players, he is now seeing growth of the Fandom team, especially since it has become easier to follow these teams.
Having MLB teams on the ground did not hurt either. Before this year, the last time the MLB played official matches in Japan, it was in 2019, and Garden said that the League hoped that when he accepts his new CBA, which should expire in 2026, he will be delivered with “an even greater [international] plan.”
MLB will organize a list of games in Monterrey, Mexico, later this month.
“This kind of thing is doing years, and it takes a lot of time in participation in young people until you really mature,” said Garden. “You can see the highest point now, and this should inaugurate a new era of prosperity for MLB and baseball in Asia.”
