The Los Angeles Dodgers had two main agendas when they signed Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani to record-breaking contracts last offseason, build a better team to win a World Series and to capture the heart of an entire nation.
After winning their eighth championship in franchise history, the Dodgers can emphatically check off part one. They plan to compete for a World Series beyond just 2024, but so far have reaped immediate returns on their investments.
It might be too soon to declare they’ve established a foothold in Japan, but the early outlook is certainly promising. The 2024 World Series averaged 12.9 million viewers in Japan, which was a record-high and made it the most watched Fall Classic in the country’s history.
The first two games of the series each had an audience of over 15 million. Game 2 was the most-watched postseason game in Japan’s history, with an average of 15.9 million viewers tuning in to watch the Dodgers and Yankees.
While that alone might not be enough to give a complete picture of how the Dodgers are taking Japan by storm, it is very noticeable to people with an outside perspective like MLB veteran Dallas Kuechel, according to Joel Sherman of MLB Network:
“I saw some Yankees hats, but everywhere it was the ‘D’ for Dodgers on shirts and hats,” Keuchel observed.
Kuechel had a strange 2024 season, starting out in the Seattle Mariner’s Minor League system before being traded to the Milwaukee Brewers in June. He made four starts for the Brewers but was then designated for assignment and elected free agency.
Not long after, Keuchel signed with the Chiba Lotte Marines of the Nippon Professional Baseball Organization (NPB) on July 30, where he finished out the rest of the season. It was in that time that he got a good understanding for how the Dodgers were being embraced in Japan.
The MLB world should better understand how popular the Dodgers are in Japan when the team kicks off the 2025 regular season in Tokyo against the Chicago Cubs.
Dallas Kuechel: Roki Sasaki signing with Dodgers
Given that Kuechel was teammates with Roki Sasaki on the Marines, he believes he has a pretty good guess into what team the right-hander will end up choosing.
Keuchel developed a strong sense that Sasaki will end up with the Dodgers, which many in the industry have also predicted.
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