Although Shohei Ohtani’s first trip to the Major League Baseball (MLB) World Series is a global sports event, it is particularly big in Japan.
Fans from Ohtani’s home nation bought more World Series tickets for the first two games than from anywhere outside North America, ticket broker StubHub said.
Dodger Stadium was packed to the rafters on Friday night for the start of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ showdown with the New York Yankees.
Photo: Reuters
“Ohtani’s first season with the Dodgers drew big international appeal, especially from his home country of Japan,” StubHub spokesperson Adam Budelli said.
“At the beginning of the season, buyers from Japan accounted for 22 percent of all tickets sold for Dodgers games. This momentum for the expected MVP has carried into the World Series, where outside of North America, Japan leads ticket sales for games in Los Angeles,” he said.
That is no surprise, given Ohtani’s ascent to a position of becoming an avatar for national identity occupied by only a few athletes in world history, like Lionel Messi in Argentina or Wayne Gretzky in Canada.
Ohtani was already a Japanese icon before his six seasons with the Los Angeles Angels, but his fame and celebrity have even grown since he joined the powerhouse Dodgers as a free agent and promptly put up a 50-50 season to earn his first major league playoff appearance — and probably his third Most Valuable Player award.
Ohtani is bigger than any athlete, but the Dodgers are in an even brighter spotlight in Japan because of
the presence of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the US$325 million rookie who signed with Los Angeles shortly after Ohtani last winter.
Japan has already shown dramatic interest in these playoffs — and not solely in the Dodgers, either.
Game 5 of the Dodgers-Padres NL Division Series featured Yamamoto against San Diego’s Yu Darvish in the first postseason matchup of Japan-born pitchers in MLB history, and also the first MLB playoff game with three Japanese-born players starting.
The broadcast drew about 13 million viewers in Japan — which means about 10 percent of Japan’s entire population watched the Dodgers beat the Padres 2-0.
“I just think that it’s going to be a global World Series,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
“I still stand by the fact that more eyeballs are going to be watching this World Series than any other series in history,” he said.
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