Last year’s World Series between the New York Yankees and the eventual champions, a Los Angeles Dodgers team led by Japanese phenom Shohei Ohtani, earned the best ratings in seven years. Just a year prior, the previous Fall Classic recorded its lowest viewership in television history.
It’s a dramatic turnaround that can be attributed to a number of factors, including the two large-market teams’ historic rivalry. But experts say there’s another undeniable reason for the reversal: the Japanese superstars who lit up the league. Big names like Ohtani and Dodgers southpaw Yoshinobu Yamamoto have helped revitalize baseball, a sport that some say has experienced waning popularity in the U.S. for some time.
Now, five Japanese players are set to headline Major League Baseball’s season opener in Tokyo on Tuesday in a contest between the Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs meant to drum up interest in MLB abroad. With this milestone, historians, executives and advocates are reflecting on how these athletes have brought a new audience with them, helping make the American sport of baseball one of international appeal and ultimately helping change the face of both the game and its fans.
“It’s redefining itself as the world’s best league, not as American or North American baseball, and that’s going to help itself as it expands its market to Asia,” said Rob Fitts, curatorial consultant for the Baseball Hall of Fame’s yakyu exhibit. (Yakyu is the Japanese word for baseball.)
A resurgence in interest in ‘America’s pastime’
The two-game Tokyo Series, which kicks off the regular season, is the first opener played in Japan since 2019. It’s part of the MLB World Tour, a slate of games the league has planned to expand its global reach. The series joins a long line of openers abroad, including in Australia and Mexico. Last year’s opener was played at the Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, South Korea.
This time around, it features Cubs ace Shota Imanaga and outfielder Seiya Suzuki, in addition to the Dodgers’ Ohtani, Yamamoto and rookie pitcher Roki Sasaki, a young righty whose debut is highly anticipated after his free agency dominated offseason conversations. A showdown between Imanaga and Yamamoto has already been announced for Game 1. And promotions have proliferated on social media, including a collaboration between MLB and the television series “Demon Slayer” for an anime-style short film about the evolution of Japanese baseball.
For many baseball aficionados, the Tokyo Series represents not only a homecoming for some of the game’s biggest stars, but also MLB’s expanding popularity in the region. Last year, weekly average attendance at MLB games was up around 13% and television ratings were up roughly 42%. That’s in part because of interest from Japanese fans, Chris Marinak, the league’s chief operations and strategy officer, told NBC News. Japanese tourist attendance at MLB games has more than quadrupled since 2019, and fans continue to follow games from abroad. Global viewership has increased significantly from the previous season as well, with Asia recording a 32% spike.
“It’s just a tremendous growth that we’ve had in people traveling from Asia to consume baseball in the United States because they think it’s a cool experience,” Marinak said.
Adam Burke, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, said currently about 80% to 90% of all visitors from Japan include at least one Dodgers game on their itinerary. And in 2024, the first year that Ohtani and Yamamoto spent with the Dodgers, Japanese visitation to Los Angeles grew by 26% compared to the year prior. Dodger Stadium has had to hire a number of Japanese-speaking tour guides to account for this uptick, Burke said.
“People want to see where Ohtani and Yamamoto and Sasaki play, even if they’re not there that day for a game,” Burke said.
American baseball has struggled with relevance
It’s welcome energy for a sport that has long struggled to maintain its relevance in the U.S., experts say. In a Gallup poll conducted in December 2023, football came out on top as Americans’ favorite sport, with 41% saying it’s what they like to watch most. It eclipsed baseball as the top sport back in 1972 and has been steadily expanding its lead since. In the 2023 poll, baseball and basketball were practically tied for a distant second at 10% and 9%, respectively.
One long-standing issue has been the pace of the game, particularly compared to sports like basketball and football, Fitts said. Its more leisurely tempo has fallen out of favor with younger generations, who prefer quicker play.
“Baseball is more of a long-term commitment to a team,” he added. “The games are certainly slower. One game rarely matters until you get to the playoffs.”
Data shows that the average length of an MLB game peaked in 2021, at 3 hours and 10 minutes. But changes like the pitch clock, instituted in 2023, are working to fix that. Last year, the average length of a game was the lowest since the mid-1980s, at 2 hours and 36 minutes.
However, baseball has seen an uptick in interest in recent years. A 2023 survey by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association estimated that 16.7 million people participated in the sport nationwide, the highest number since the survey began in 2008.
A new global crowd and the ‘Ohtani effect’
New fandoms have emerged with the introduction of elite Japanese players into MLB, said Sayuri Guthrie Shimizu, the author of “Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War.” As Shimizu explained, the most recent crop of Japanese stars in particular had already enjoyed a great deal of success in Japan, amassing loyal followings during their time in Nippon Professional Baseball, Japan’s top league. Most were already considered the best in their home country. Yamamoto, for example, was a three-time most valuable player in NPB’s Pacific League and had racked up fans as a star pitcher for the Orix Buffaloes. And those supporters don’t just disappear.
“There was a reservoir of fans that these players had before moving to the U.S.,” said Shimizu, a history professor at Rice University. “So these fans are going to shift their gaze to the Major League Baseball games after their hero moves to the United States.”
The interest in these Japanese players trickles into the rest of the league as well, especially since MLB games are televised in Japan, Marinak said.
“Fans are more interested in the product overall. Maybe that’s accentuated by a couple star players that are really attention-grabbing, but then that gets fans bought into the storylines,” he said. “They’re interested in the trajectory of the season and the playoff chase.”
There’s also the “Ohtani effect,” Fitts said. The two-way phenom, who’s won three MVP awards and last year became the first player to reach 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a season, has been making his mark in the league since he debuted with the Angels in 2018. And now that he’s playing for repeat World Series contenders the Dodgers, both baseball fans and casual watchers from the U.S. and abroad don’t want to miss a chance to witness history.
“Ohtani is bringing in maybe even millions of people who had very little interest in Major League Baseball,” Fitts said.
Baseball’s deep history in Japan
Baseball’s roots in Japan and other parts of Asia go back roughly 150 years. The country adopted the sport as it was expanding militarily and nationalism was taking hold, and as it sought to establish an image of masculinity and dominance, Fitts said. Areas that were colonized by Japan, like Korea and Taiwan, also ended up absorbing strong baseball cultures as a result of that colonial past, Shimizu added. The sport has only continued to be part of the region’s identity.
While pitcher Masanori Murakami played a short stint with the San Francisco Giants in 1964, it was ultimately “The Tornado,” Hideo Nomo of the Dodgers, who opened the door for Japanese players to find a home in the U.S. With the help of agent Don Nomura, the pitcher utilized a loophole to secure his release from NPB’s Kintetsu Buffaloes and move over to the States. Nomo didn’t receive the same well wishes in 1995 that Ohtani and others get from their Japanese fans today, Nomura told NBC News.
“He was considered a traitor along with myself,” Nomura recounted. “I had death threats. I’m sure he had some of those too.”
Nowadays, Shimizu said, Japanese fans pay almost as much attention to MLB as they do to NPB. And considering baseball’s struggling popularity in the U.S., she added, the league needs them.
A new era for the game
“Baseball, in order to survive, they have to really transnationalize itself in terms of player base and audience,” Shimizu said.
Marinak said MLB is going to continue to look toward Japan as an investment focus, planning more events like the World Baseball Classic in the country and looking to expose more kids to the U.S. league. It’s all with the aim of growing the game, developing players and creating the “next generation of stars,” he said.
Nomura said that with the growing interest in Japan’s top talent, he hopes MLB doesn’t just use Japan or Asia for financial gain, and instead gives back to the youth there beyond its baseball programs. Still, he said, watching the sport evolve from being seen as an American game to an international one is a good thing. After all, it’s always been about revolution, he said.
“You have Jackie Robinson, who changed the color of the game. Then you have [Fernando] Valenzuela, who changed the border of the game. Then you have Hideo Nomo make it into an internationalization of the game,” Nomura said. “There has been a shift of ballplayers migrating to another country and helping their original country by expanding the game of baseball.”
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