By Colby Wyatt
Sold out crowd during a regular season game of the Nippon Baseball League at the Tokyo Dome. (IQREMIX/https://flic.kr/p/su1MUv)
On March 18 and 19 two of the most popular MLB teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs, will be playing a series in front of a crowd of over 55,000 people at the Tokyo Dome in Japan. On top of that, millions of people from around Japan will be tuning in to watch homegrown MLB stars like Shohei Ohtani and Shota Imanaga in a series that will be broadcast around the world.
The excitement of the Tokyo Series doesn’t come without its drawbacks. Some issues of the event are that these games will count towards the regular season, despite them taking place during spring training. The fact that both games take place at 6 a.m. Eastern Time makes it harder for fans in the U.S. to watch. Despite these drawbacks, the series is vital to growing the game around the world.
The MLB is in the midst of a renaissance. The 2024 season saw a record high of 12.1 billion in revenue generated, which breaks the record high of 11.6 billion in 2023. The 2024 season had the highest attendance rate since 2017 as well as an 11% increase since 2022. There haven’t been consecutive seasons of growth in over ten years. To top it all off, MLB.TV saw a 14.7% increase in viewership in 2024.
But baseball isn’t just growing in the United States, it’s growing worldwide. Part of the reason the MLB has seen so much expansion recently is because of foreign players. In 2024, 27.8% of the players were born outside of the United States, which is the fourth most of all time. Many are stars of the league, like Shohei Ohtani. Meanwhile, The World Baseball Classic saw its best year ever in 2024, breaking both attendance and viewership records worldwide.
Japan is one of the largest markets for the MLB internationally. Despite having their own very popular professional league (Nippon Baseball League), they averaged 12.1 million viewers during the MLB World Series in 2024, compared to a U.S. viewership of 15.8 million. An impressive 42.4 percent of Japanese households tuned into the World Baseball Classic Final in 2023.
Considering the Japanese talent in the MLB and the country’s love for the sport, Japan is a natural choice for the league to host a series. The Tokyo Series places the MLB on the global stage. While viewership will likely be lower among U.S. audiences, the event is designed with international fans in mind. It has the opportunity to be even bigger than the Seoul Series last year, which generated nearly 1 billion total impressions worldwide.
A successful Tokyo Series will continue a century-old trend of baseball outgrowing its American roots. In 1934, Babe Ruth traveled to Japan with an All-Star team. When he got off the plane he was shocked to find a crowd waiting for him. Fast forward to today, and Japan is one of the global capitals of baseball. The Tokyo Series and similar events are essential steps in embracing the global nature of the game that Ruth’s experience foreshadowed.