Major League Baseball kicks off its global push on safe and ravenous soil in Tokyo
- All-time great Ichiro Suzuki is bowing out from the MLB in Tokyo series
- Baseball returns to the Olympics in 2020
Every one of the 45,787 seats in the Tokyo Dome were filled as a festive crowd was treated to an entertaining slugfest with the Mariners beating the A’s 9-7. Despite the lack of star power on the A’s and Mariners roster, baseball will always sell-out in Japan. Throw in the presence of the Mariner’s 45-year-old Ichiro, an icon on both sides of the Pacific, playing in what should likely be his final go-round in a Major League uniform, and the two-game series suddenly became the hottest ticket in the country.
But how do you fill 60,000 seats in London, in June with nothing at all resembling an indigenous star and virtually no baseball culture to speak of? You bring in the heavyweights, that’s how.
When the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox resume their age-old, high-profile rivalry on June 29 and 30 at London Stadium, the 2012 Olympic venue and current home to Premier League football side West Ham United, rest assured that just like the Tokyo Dome, there will not be an empty seat in the house.
As it prepares to make its return to Olympic medal competition in 15 months’ time at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games, baseball is going international in a big way and MLB is leading the charge.
In 2019 there will be four international series, with games in Tokyo, London and two in Monterrey, Mexico.
“It’s a plan that was devised under former commissioner Bud Selig and picked up with zeal by the current commissioner, Rob Manfred,” said Jim Small, senior vice president of MLB’s international business. “Of course, it helps to have baseball returning to the Olympics. But the goal is to grow the game of baseball around the world and, naturally, grow our brand and business as well. So our sponsorship business, TV business and licensing business, all of it gets supercharged when we bring our events in.”
It’s also a rare opportunity for baseball fans out here to reset their personal time clock.
“It’s common sense because our games come at nine o’clock in the morning,” Small said. “Except now when we’re here, these are prime-time games throughout Asia and it allows our hard-core fans to watch in a time that is much more user friendly.”
For the past 15 years, Small oversaw MLB’s Asia-Pacific business based in Tokyo until his appointment in February to run the entire global business operation. But despite growth in parts of Europe and Australasia, any significant leap in popularity, and revenue, for baseball will be coming from here.
“The game is strong in our mature markets in Asia, in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, where it remains the number one sport by any measure, whether that’s attendance, revenue or general popularity,” Small said. “China, of course, is the big market for everyone and we have invested significantly there for the last 10 years. What we are seeing is we are finally getting pick up there. We have seven players in minor league baseball now who have come out of our academies in China.”
Of course, even a little is a lot in China, where growth is all relative. Football and basketball are far ahead of any other sport. Retired basketball legend Kobe Bryant could not move around even the most remote villages of this vast country without causing a commotion.
However, while baseball superstars, like Bryce Harper and Mike Trout, are virtually invisible in China, they also lag significantly behind NBA and even NFL stars on the popular culture scale back home in the US. But not in Japan, where the likes of Ichiro and young stud Shohie Ohtani can’t draw a breath without a flashbulb popping.
It’s difficult to overstate Ichiro’s popularity in his homeland and it’s also heartening for the baseball industry, that his heir apparent is in place with Ohtani. The most freakish and unique baseball talent in the world, Japan’s Ohtani is the California Angels’ strapping young pitching and slugging star who will most certainly be the headliner when MLB returns to play here in a few years’ time. But for now and for the Mariners and A’s, it was game one of 162.
For baseball, and most importantly for Japan, it was a chance to say farewell to a living, breathing national monument. Not exactly a hard ticket to sell – on either side of the Pacific.
