TOKYO — During the early innings of a nighttime exhibition between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Yomiuri Giants, Nori Kawana walked through the concourse of the Tokyo Dome in disbelief. As the head of Fanatics’ East Asia operation, Kawana leads MLB’s merchandising in Japan, and the day had already set his company’s sales record in Asia. He was willing to bet no other sports retailer had ever had a better day in the region, either.
Seemingly every other fan at the Dome wore national hero Shohei Ohtani’s No. 17 jersey. Some 20 minutes after Kawana stopped to talk to a reporter, Ohtani ripped a home run to right field, and the frenzy continued. Just outside the Dome, fans streamed through a 31,000-foot MLB retail store, even as it grew late on a Saturday. Fanatics and MLB clocked an average of 1,100 transactions every hour across 140 registers.
The much-anticipated centerpiece of MLB’s week in Japan, the regular-season games between the Dodgers and Cubs, were still three days away.
“The Tokyo series is going to be the biggest standalone international event in the history of Major League Baseball,” league commissioner Rob Manfred said.
If MLB has its way, the series will also serve as a beginning. The league sees a trove of fan interest and cash to be unlocked in Japan, a country long obsessed with baseball that has grown infatuated with the defending World Series champion Dodgers and their expat star, Ohtani. The mission at baseball’s central office is to broaden the appeal of the whole league here, and success would not be trivial.
“We do believe there are payoffs in the B’s: billions,” Manfred said.
Manfred expects this Opening Series will set records across the board among league special events, including in viewership and revenue, the latter pegged by Manfred at $35 million. The only comparison he sees is to the league’s annual All-Star Game, an analogy that both flatters and undersells the moment: The midsummer classic is MLB’s premier standalone event, but also never produces the kind of fervor Japan has shown this week.
To Manfred, MLB has the benefit of both years of work in Japan — the first Opening Series was 25 years ago this month — as well as the lightning-in-a-bottle stardom of Ohtani. Last season, he became the first player in MLB history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in one year.
“We have really stayed after Japan, but it takes time for something like this to grow,” Manfred said. “Ohtani is like the accelerator. I mean, every once in a while, even we need to get lucky, right?”
MLB has multiple avenues for growth, and more games abroad is an obvious starting point. National teams from MLB and Japan will participate in another World Baseball Classic, the sport’s recurring international tournament, next year. But Manfred also expects to propose “more regular activity” in Japan and Korea in future negotiations with the MLB players’ union. Japan wants to see an event like the Opening Series every three years, he said.
But the greatest windfall lies with media rights: in the telecasts of stateside MLB games in Japan, including Ohtani’s Dodgers.
“Because media unlocks everything else,” said Dodgers president Stan Kasten, who has also run an NBA and NHL team. “What the NBA learned was the importance of exposure. The NBA got their finals in 200 countries around the world on television.”
MLB’s international TV deals expire following the 2028 season, at the same time the league’s national contracts in the U.S. conclude. When negotiating the next iterations, Manfred intends to dangle the possibility of bundling both together, hoping to entice the major streaming companies that seek audiences both in the U.S. and abroad.
“The explosion in popularity in Korea and Japan is going to create an opportunity to fundamentally change the way we sell our media rights,” Manfred said. “We’ve traditionally sold them in (individual) countries, and I think in 2028 they will be sold as part of an international package that will help us drive our media revenue in general.”
A powerful advertising agency, Dentsu, has brokered MLB’s TV rights in Japan since 1990, sublicensing to major broadcasters like NHK. Another company, Eclat, sells MLB’s streaming rights in the country. Overall, MLB has 10 TV partners in Japan today.
“Particularly in a digital space, we’re going to sell the rights where we get the best deal,” Manfred said.
But ultimately, how much MLB can grow in Japan likely depends on a few questions: How well can MLB tailor itself to the Japanese customer? And is the outcome really in MLB’s hands, or does the league’s fate rest with star players and their individual teams?
“Thinking about MLB entering the Japanese market, do people watch baseball because of the MLB teams? I don’t think so,” said Mariko Sakakibara, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who teaches international business courses and previously served as the deputy director of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry. “People watch MLB games because those teams have familiar players, right? And so it’s player-driven.”
In the last five years, Ohtani merchandise has accounted for 57 percent of Fanatics’ sales in Japan, Kawana said. Ohtani is so ubiquitous that it makes for a game: Try to wander around Tokyo for a few minutes and not catch a glimpse of him.
He appears not only on a multi-story New Balance display near the city’s famed Shibuya Crossing, but on smaller Seiko watch ads along the moving walkways at Haneda airport — a greeting for visitors who might have just landed on a Japan Airlines plane wrapped in his image. He is on both bottles and boxes of Ito En green tea in the convenience chain Family Mart, and on the banner above one’s head when entering the store. In a taxi ride at the end of one’s day, Ohtani might recommend a mattress on the passenger’s video monitor.
In Japan, Ohtani’s face is everywhere. (Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images)
MLB believes there’s a halo effect to be had from that omnipresence. But there’s a competing theory that essentially places MLB at the mercy of its individual clubs.
“If you really want to grow MLB, it’s by attracting more NPB players to a more diverse set of major-league teams,” said player agent Joel Wolfe, who represents Ohtani’s Dodgers teammates Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki, both Japanese. “MLB can’t do that. It’s on the individual teams that are truly interested to take the time to research and find the right people to expand their presence individually as organizations in Japan. Because MLB has been at the forefront of the minds of NPB players and fans for decades.”
At the team level, recruitment is an uneven playing field. What the Dodgers have done in landing all three of Ohtani, Yamamoto and Sasaki would be hard to replicate. It was hardly an accident.
“We saw this day coming,” Kasten said.
Kasten rattled off all the groundwork the Dodgers laid: attempts to sign Ohtani a decade ago and again seven years ago when he landed with the Angels, then preparing for his free agency years in advance. They signed Sasaki this winter when his Japanese team made him available, but the team had been ready for that possibility for at least a couple years, separating itself from the pack.
“It was like the Powerball got to $1.5 billion and all of a sudden the entire league wanted to drive down to the corner store and buy a lottery ticket. But they soon realized that it didn’t work that way for this kid, and most Japanese players,” Wolfe said of the Sasaki sweepstakes. “There’s a handful of teams that have spent an enormous amount of time, energy and manpower building a ground game in Japan and learning about Japanese culture. The ones that just showed up out of nowhere really didn’t have much of a chance to separate themselves.”
It is inevitable that more Japanese stars will play in the U.S. But if the rate of defection spikes, complexities or even conflict could follow. The nation already has its own professional league, Nippon Professional Baseball, where all three of the Dodgers’ stars once played.
Recently, top Japanese talents have started pursuing MLB careers at a younger age, bucking an expectation that players remain in their home country for much of their prime. NPB official historian Nobby Ito said that “of course, it is not positive” to lose the best players, but added “it is not necessarily negative” either, because MLB helps expose Japanese kids to baseball and spurs NPB teams to grow.
“You don’t want to do damage,” Manfred said, “and you’ve got to be a little careful about that.”
Ohtani jerseys are everywhere in Japan. (Mary DeCicco / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
Japanese teams, often resistant to change, have some leverage. They are party to the posting agreement that allows for NPB teams to put their players up for bidding, and any party can seek revision to the agreement, or even terminate it.
“It’s good for the business for there to be players performing at a very high level in Major League Baseball because it sort of validates the quality of play in Japan, right?” Manfred said. “In a perfect world with no other consideration, we’d have every one of the best players in the world playing Major League Baseball. But the fact of the matter is we also recognize we can’t play every day in Japan, and we want a thriving domestic product in Japan.”
After a meeting with NPB commissioner Sadayuki Sakakibara on Sunday in Tokyo, Manfred said he does not expect NPB will push for change in the near future.
“Deference and humility go a long way in this country,” said Ulrike Schaede, professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego. “The commissioner’s right. I would tread very carefully about this.”
While the Dodgers guard their strategies for recruiting top Japanese players, they will gladly tell other teams how to then make money off them.
MLB clubs share best off-the-field practices, and the Dodgers are piloting a program in Japan that has been successful in European soccer: a paid fan club, which is a joint venture between MLB and the team. There are different annual membership fees for four levels, starting at $45 or so and ranging up to $500. Exclusive opportunities come along, from special events to offers for bobbleheads and tickets.
“MLB hasn’t done this with an individual team before, and maybe the time will come that all teams will do that based on what we learn,” Kasten said. “Remember, Premier League and La Liga teams have hundreds of millions of signed-up fans around the world. Hundreds of millions. And so far, we don’t have any because we haven’t started those programs.”
The profits of the fan club are considered international revenue, which means they are shared equally among the 30 MLB teams. The same is true for the money MLB makes from international TV deals. It isn’t clear what percentage of the league’s overall revenue the international bucket accounts for, but “it’s a significant number that can grow significantly bigger,” Kasten said.
“It’s not a small rounding error,” he said.
Most companies trying to grow in Japan have a steep learning curve. But MLB has an advantage in that its product is already entrenched.
Baseball is Japan’s top sport. In the last few years, research revealed accounts of its arrival here in 1871, a year earlier than previously understood. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and other Hall of Famers famously came to Japan on tour in 1934.
“I appreciate the fact that if you show up in Japan on day one as ‘New Company X,’ there are challenges,” Manfred said. “The relationship between American baseball and Japanese baseball, I mean hell, it goes back to Babe Ruth for God’s sake,” said Manfred. “That’s not an issue for us.”
But customers in Japan do have nuances compared to those in the U.S. — “You don’t want to come in and say, ‘we have the better way,’” Schaede said — and the league will benefit from partnerships with companies that want to grow in Japan alongside it.
Nori Kawana of Fanatics. (Evan Drellich / The Athletic)
Kawana of Fanatics noted that Japanese fans do not wear sports jerseys day to day nearly as often as their U.S. counterparts. His mission is to convince them it’s cool to do so. The company collaborated with the artist Takashi Murakami on limited-edition merchandise for the Opening Series that sold out almost within an hour.
Japanese fans also expect a high level of service, and one of Kawana’s first undertakings at Fanatics was to reduce shipping times. “We’ve got to make sure the customers are treated with care in a much more granular way than I think anywhere else,” he said.
Both Fanatics and New Balance pointed to the different tastes in graphic T-shirts fans in Japan have. Illustration can be key. Japan is “one of the most fashion-forward countries in the world,” said Evan Zeder, New Balance’s head of baseball marketing. New Balance sponsors Ohtani, but the sneaker brand had a presence in the country well before that long-term deal was struck in 2023.
Topps, which has a multi-level installation in Tokyo during the Opening Series not far from New Balance’s, has seen an explosion in sales here, but still considers the country something of a nascent market. The Fanatics-owned brand said it totaled $22.6 million last year in Japan, up from $1.5 million in 2021.
“There’s definitely demand here for high-end $10,000 boxes,” said David Leiner, Topps’ president of trading cards. “But we think ultimately, to be most successful and to really grow the market and to introduce new collectors, we’ve got to have some lower-level price points to get people to try it.”
The best way for MLB to connect in Japan might be to take up efforts that read less like marketing at all. Sakakibara of UCLA suggested MLB focus on projects that benefit Japanese baseball and the country more broadly, such as arranging more games between MLB and NPB teams, and educational and community efforts.
On Monday, Manfred and a host of retired MLB stars, including CC Sabathia and Adam Jones, visited a school in Tokyo to hold a baseball skills event.
“It hasn’t changed since I was over there,” said Trey Hillman, a consultant to NPB’s Nippon Ham Fighters who has been a manager in MLB, NPB and Korea’s top league as well. “If they know that you’re in and that it’s genuine and sincere, and you really want to build a business relationship, it’s got to start at the grassroots. They’re not as quick to make changes as we are here in the United States.”
Nothing, of course, might be more grassroots than the homegrown role model who hits home runs every other night. In 2023, Ohtani said he would donate roughly 60,000 New Balance baseball gloves across schools in Japan.
“I don’t believe there’s ever been an athlete with this much demand in baseball,” said Zeder of New Balance, which manufactured the gloves. “I think people want to connect to an athlete, and I think people want to connect to someone who has achieved the greatness that he has.”
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photos: Robert Gauthier, Kiyosha Ota, Yuki Taguchi, Yuichi Yamazaki, Gene Wang, Harry How / Getty Images)
