Featured image credit: Luke Robinson on Unsplash
Major League Baseball has hailed last week’s Tokyo Series as the biggest standalone international event in the league’s history as more than 250,000 fans attended six games at the Tokyo Dome.
The Series marked the start of the 2025 MLB regular season, with the Los Angeles Dodgers facing off against the Chicago Cubs on March 18 and March 19.
Prior to that, the two teams each played an exhibition game against Japanese outfits the Hanshin Tigers and Yomiuri Giants. In total, the six games drew an attendance of 252,795, with each fixture attracting an average crowd of around 42,000.
During the Mastercard presale ticket phase, more than 380,000 people were trying to get tickets at the same time. Away from the games, the MLB Tokyo Series Fan Fest proved popular, attracting more than 450,000 fans over the course of 12 days. The free event at the Tokyo Skytree became the most-visited MLB fan festival in the history of the league.
MLB announced plans for the Tokyo Series in July last year, with the games marking the league’s first visit to Japan since 2019. Dodgers star man Shohei Ohtani, who is from Japan, was a major draw for fans, with the opening game of the Tokyo Series drawing an average of more than 25 million viewers across all platforms – a record for an MLB game in Japan.
The Dodgers’ exhibition game against the Giants averaged 18 million viewers across all platforms, making it the most-watched MLB exhibition game ever in Japan.
The Tokyo Series also recorded the best merchandise sales of any MLB international event in history, with sales eclipsing the previous biggest international event, the 2024 London Series, by 320%. The official MLB store at the Tokyo Dome was operated by Fanatics and surpassed sales of all previous MLB All-Star Weeks.
The Tokyo Dome store averaged more than 1,000 transactions per hour, with more than half a million products sold. The most popular item was the Ohtani Dodgers jersey with the Tokyo Series patch.
Fanatics also announced that the Tokyo Series was the best-selling special event in company history across all sports, with more than 200,000 fans shopping at official stores in Tokyo throughout the week.
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