America’s Sport Export
By: Greg Maresca
With all the banter regarding tariffs on imports and while many sports aficionados were consumed with filling out their NCAA basketball tournament brackets, the Major League Baseball (MLB) season’s annual road show got underway in Tokyo, Japan. In case you forgot, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the defending World Series champions, took two from the Chicago Cubs.
The two regular-season games in the land of the rising sun included four spring training games that drew a combined 252,795 to the Tokyo Dome. The MLB Tokyo Series Fan Fest attracted more than 450,000 over a weeklong celebration of baseball in Japan, amounting to the most-visited fan festival and with it the best sales day of any international baseball event in MLB history, surpassing the 2024 London Series by 320%.
Twenty percent of Japan tuned in to the two-game set, making it the most-watched MLB game in Japan – a record that also saw ticket prices cost as much as a scalped ducat to the Super Bowl. After all, the series showcased the homecoming of Japanese MLB All-Stars: Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki.
Shohei Ohtani, the game’s best and most versatile player – a generational talent if there ever was one – did not disappoint the fans who sold out the Tokyo Dome by recording three hits in eight plate appearances, including a home run.
According to Front Office Sports, TV rating numbers adjusted for Japan’s population were higher than those for the NFL AFC championship game back in January. Moreover, game time was not adjusted to accommodate an American audience, as the first pitch was thrown at 3 a.m. Los Angeles time.
I remember the Rumble in the Jungle bout when George Foreman lost the Heavyweight Title to Muhammad Ali. The fight was in Kinshasa, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that got underway at 4:30 a.m. local time to accommodate the closed-circuit venues that carried the fight back in the United States.
Those days are long gone, just like the $5 bleacher seats we would get to scope out more high-end seats once the game got underway. Stickball is dead. Little League is on life support — same for American Legion ball, while $8 hotdogs, $12 bottles of beer and $50.00 parking spots are vogue.
Despite all the changes on the field and the nonstop efforts through digital platforms to modernize a game with its roots firmly planted in the early part of the last century, MLB would be cut from the 40-man roster. The homegrown game is no longer the national pastime and hasn’t been for at least two generations.
The popularity of baseball in Japan and Korea contrasts with a shrinking American audience. According to Nielsen, the average age of your typical MLB fan is a 57-year-old Caucasian man.
With their MVP-filled lineup and a payroll of nearly $400 million, the Dodgers are the favorite to repeat as World Series champs.
Is a title such as “World Series” truly relevant?
The World Series dates to 1903, when MLB did not have one team west of the Mississippi. Japan and neighboring Korea both have professional baseball leagues but have yet to participate in a World Series with the best of the MLB.
Professional baseball in Japan dates back over a century and is now the national pastime, having surpassed Sumo wrestling and soccer. Thanks to American Christian missionaries, baseball in South Korea dates to 1905, with the Koreans getting a much later start fielding their first professional league in 1982. Since then, Korea has produced its share of talented players who starred on the international stage in Chan Ho Park and Hyun-jin Ryu.
Amid the NCAA’s March Madness, MLB’s opening day in the U.S. was on March 27, 2025, a Thursday affair that was greeted with little fanfare. The regular season will end in early October, giving way to an expanded playoff that now runs into early November.
Cut the regular season from 162 games and make it a true World Series by inviting the best of the world of professional baseball. With 28% of MLB players foreign-born, baseball is heading toward a true World Series, but the question remains: Will America be tuning in?
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