Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei #17 waves fans as he leaves the field after the MLB Tokyo opening series between Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in Tokyo Dome on March 19, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.
Jean Wang | Ghetto images
In the morning of the second and last game of the Tokyo series in Tokyo in a baseball of Major League between Chicago cubes and Los Angeles Dodgers on March 19, snow dust fell on the capital of Japan – an extremely rare event during the year, more commonly known as the flowering of cherry flowering.
But this does not dissuade more than a thousand people from the arrangement of shopping at a MLB store run by 31 100 square feet out of the dome in Tokyo when it opened this morning.
This is a reflection of the type of impact that Shohei Ohtani has on the MLB business in Japan, an impact that increased only in size, as he then signed then a professional sports record of 10-year-old, $ 700 million in Dogers in December 2023, and for the first time for the MLB title in the world.
Last year, Fanatics, which manages the MLB goods business worldwide, marked a 170% increase in MLB sales for sales during the year in Japan, according to Nori Cavanar, managing director of East Asia by fanatics. In the last five years, Otani -related goods have been 57% of all MLB sales in the MLB Store Japan and Fanatics Japan, while sales of DODGERS goods have increased by over 2000% during the year as he signed with the team, Kavanan said.
Japan has a deep baseball history and is the most popular sport in the country for both spectators and participants. MLB also has a long relationship with the country, dating from Barnstorming Games, who saw players such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play in exhibition games in Japan so far the deeper relationships between MLB and Nippon Professional Baseball.
Noah Garden, Deputy Commissioner for Business and Media of MLB, said Japan is the largest commercial market in the league outside the US and Canada, something that it attributes to these long-term investments.
“It just doesn’t happen overnight,” Garden said. However, he added: “And then you had this talent in life.”
Garden said that when MLB looks around the world, “Business things usually fall behind the Fandome with a few ticks.”
In Japan, where MLB “just scratches the surface,” Garden said, “the possibilities explode.”
The first game of this year’s series in Tokyo was watched by 25 million viewers in Japan, according to MLB, setting a new record for the most watched game in the country-population of Japan is approximately 125 million. The second game is an average of more than 23 million viewers.
Although this is not an accurate comparison of apples to apples, the world series of DODGERS-NEW YORK YANKEES 2024 is an average of 15.8 million viewers in the United States (and 12.1 million in Japan, where the games started in the morning).
MLB plans to feed this growing fanbase in Japan with content. The league has long had an office in the country and has recently expanded its original and translates Japanese content for the MLB and MLB.com app. It also adds a newsletter and a content hub that follows players born from Japan. As well as updating your MLB Gamedeay product that provides game tracking and sophisticated statistics to be in Japanese.
Fans pose for photos before the baseball game between Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in the MLB Tokyo series outside Tokyo Dome in Tokyo on March 18, 2025.
Yuichi Yamazaki |
Garden said a growing audience is changing the way the league thinks about its next media rights contract, with its international and domestic deals expiring after the 2028 season. “When the next set of deals increases, you will find people looking for rights worldwide, especially streams,” Garden said. “The amount of people engaged and watching the game internationally, I think it opens everyone’s eyes.”
For the series in Tokyo, the NTV air and Amazon Prime streams were broadcast.
It is also sponsorship, Garden said, with US companies seeing the opportunity to break down the Japanese market, while Japanese companies are not only able to do things with MLB now locally, but also reach US consumers. In the last two years, MLB has signed 14 new sponsors in Japan, and the Tokyo series has been the largest international sponsorship in the league so far, generating a 240% increase in revenue compared to the Seoul series in 2024, played in Seoul, South Korea.
“We take advantage of all this type of rapprochement 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 matches between CUBS and DODGERS were immediate sales, in addition to the exhibition games held between MLB teams and local Japanese games. The search was so high, the games were broadcast in approximately 150 movie theaters in Japan.
The Tokyo series has recorded the best sales of goods at any MLB international event, with sales dimming the 2024 series in London by 320%, MLB said. Sales at the Tokyo Dome store have surpassed every MLB All-Star Week so far, selling more than half a million products. Not surprisingly, the most popular item was a T -shirt with a Tokyo patch.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred In front of New York Times that he expects the Tokyo series to set records beyond a special event in the League and can lead to $ 35 million. However, he said that the bigger goal is to develop the common league business there: “We believe there is a payment in b: billions,” Manfred told The Times.
Connecting Japanese fans with all MLB players, teams
Justin Turner # 3 of the Chicago cubes posing with young fans who wear a fake beard before the match against Yomiuri giants in Tokyo dome on March 16, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.
Central Harada | Getty Images Sport | Ghetto images
This growth will only continue as Otani, along with other players born from Japan, such as Rocky Sasaki of Dodgers and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Cubs’ Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki continue to influence MLB. But the challenge for MLB and its partners to achieve this exalted goal is to build the other league players in Japan.
David Lainer, president of commercial cards for collector fanatics, where he runs Tops, said the Fandom surrounding Baseball in Japan is undeniable, with great support not only for the MLB Japanese stars, but also for the NPB local teams.
Tops has turned its business into the eight figures in the country, Lainer said, “Sprinkle a little accelerator in growth.”
The company also has licenses for Japanese baseball and football leagues, as well as for other entertainment properties, and Lainer said the fanatics see the potential of the market to generate over nine digits.
Japanese baseball card collectors are not much different from the American, Lainer said, but one of the important differences is how much they look to support players from their country. “Do you want Derek Jeter (map) or Mike Trout (map)? Of course, they bend a little more to Japanese players in MLB and there is a lot of pride in that,” he said.
Lainer said this leads to the fandome of teams where Japanese players play, and this adheres to over time – for example, in Japan there is a contingent of Seattle Marinrs fans because of Ichiro Suzuki’s time with the team. But there are other examples that it was a fleeting phenomenon, as Japanese fans came to one player and then stopped following so carefully when this player left MLB. Now the growth of Japanese players and their impact in the league helps to build a broader Fandom for MLB.
Last season, there were 10 players born of Japan on MLB lists on the day of opening, most since 2013, when it had 11. While it was significantly traced by 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 day, respectively, respectively. MLB has not yet required teams to finalize 2025 opening lists, but the number of Japanese players is expected to increase.
Cavanat, which is based in Tokyo, said that although the Japanese fans were focused on players, he now sees growth in team fandom, especially since it became easier to follow these teams.
The presence of MLB teams has also not harmed. Before this year, the last time MLB played official games in Japan was in 2019, and Garden said the League hoped that when she agreed with her new CBA, which would expire in 2026, she would come with “even more large (international) plan.”
MLB will host the manpowder of games in Monterey, Mexico, later this month.
“These types of things are years in its creation and it takes a long time from the participation of the youth level to really mature,” Garden said. “Now you see the culmination of this, and this must be introduced into a new era of prosperity for MLB and baseball in Asia.”
