It has already been a sweet life for Fumihide Oda, chief executive of Rokkatei, one of the oldest confectionary shops in Hokkaido, Japan, and the birthplace of the popular Marusei butter sandwich cookies.
This summer, Mr. Oda anticipates life becoming even sweeter. He and his wife, along with two other couples — including his sister and her husband — will take their four children to Oakland, Calif., to experience, in person, another of Hokkaido’s treasured exports: Shohei Ohtani.
This is the family’s first overseas trip to see Mr. Ohtani. And it will be the children’s first visit to the United States.
“We have decided to go to California now because we want to see Ohtani in a Dodgers jersey!” Mr. Oda, 45, wrote in an email.
In a serendipitous bit of timing, the family will open Rokkatei’s first store in Southern California this summer. That gave them a perfect excuse to find a way to see Mr. Ohtani, whose ability to thrive as a star batter and pitcher led to his signing an outrageous and record-breaking 10-year, $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers — the largest contract in North American sports history.
“We are very, very excited that it happened to be in the same year that Mr. Ohtani will be playing for the Dodgers,” said Mr. Oda, whose grandfather founded Rokkatei under a different name in the 1930s.
As a new baseball season dawns after Mr. Ohtani’s move from the Los Angeles Angels to the Dodgers this winter, travel stories like Mr. Oda’s will crop up all season long. Having been stuck on an irrelevant team for his entire Major League Baseball career, Mr. Ohtani has joined a storied franchise packed with other stars, with a singular focus among them of winning the team an eighth World Series title.
Anticipating unprecedented interest in Mr. Ohtani and the Dodgers — especially from Mr. Ohtani’s native Japan — Major League Baseball entered into a multiyear partnership with JTB Corp., the largest travel agency in Japan. To get the ball rolling, JTB has offered international travel packages to the season-opening series between the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres in Seoul, which begins on Wednesday. The company intends to roll out further packages for regular season games in the United States as well.
Catering to very casual fans as well as those who are more passionate, the travel packages are expected to include airline tickets, hotel accommodations, transportation from hotel to stadium and pregame tours and merchandising.
“We feel that this has reached a level where even people who would not have considered going overseas to watch baseball are now interested in actually going to the stadium,” Kaori Mori, who is part of JTB’s communications and branding team, said. “In fact, we regularly send out an email newsletter with information about traveling to watch sports, and within two weeks of the news of the M.L.B. partnership, the number of registered members increased by 110 percent.”
From Hideo Nomo, who was a pitching sensation for the Dodgers in the 1990s, to Ichiro Suzuki, a Seattle Mariners icon who is likely to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame next year, players from Japan have repeatedly found success and popularity in the United States. But according to Ms. Mori, the previous stars “received a lot of attention, but this time Ohtani’s popularity is beyond imagination.”
The Ohtani Bump is being felt significantly in the United States as well. On the final day of February, according to the ticket resale site SeatGeek, an official M.L.B. partner, the Dodgers’ March 28 home opener against St. Louis was the most in-demand opening day game, with an average resale price of $567 per ticket. That was 38 percent higher than the next-most in-demand opener (Cubs at Texas).
“Going from the Angels to the Dodgers, people think, ‘Oh, it’s the same market’, but the Dodgers are at a different level in tiers of M.L.B. fan base sizes, and playing at a legacy club at that level of hype is a big combination,” Chris Leyden, director of growth marketing for SeatGeek, said. “It’s interesting, because in baseball it tends to be harder to see the impact of a singular player, partially because if they’re not a pitcher they maybe get only four or five at-bats a game, and if they’re a designated hitter it’s maybe four at-bats a game and they don’t play the field.”
In other sports, like basketball, Mr. Leyden said that individual players such as LeBron James and Stephen Curry can dramatically drive prices for single-game tickets, sometimes as much as doubling them. But in baseball, it usually takes something historic. Think Aaron Judge’s pursuit of Roger Maris’s single-season, American League home run record in 2022, which led to Yankees prices increasing by 36 percent once he was one homer short.
“We often see the impact is larger on the road than at home,” Mr. Leyden said. “It’s almost basic supply and demand. LeBron plays 41 home games, but I can see him only one time in Charlotte.”
With a three- or four-game series at each stop, baseball enjoys an advantage over other sports in that fans generally have more than one opportunity to see a rival star when his team comes to town. For those fans hoping for an in-person brush with the Dodgers and Mr. Ohtani this summer, the team’s road schedule presents creative opportunities.
The Oda group, for example, is traveling to Oakland in August for strategic reasons. The Dodgers have led the National League in attendance in each of the past 11 seasons, drawing 3.8 million fans in each of the past two seasons.
“As we will be traveling in a group of 10, we couldn’t get good seats in Dodger Stadium,” Mr. Oda said. “So we decided to see him in Oakland because it was easier to get tickets.”
He hopes they will be able to get a close look at Mr. Ohtani, who played for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in Japan before leaving for M.L.B. That should not be a problem in Oakland, where the stadium is known mostly for its vast quantities of empty seats.
As M.L.B. seeks to increase its reach, both internationally and with younger generations, Mr. Ohtani’s outsize popularity could play a huge role.
Osuke Ishiguro, a general manager in JTB’s Los Angeles office, said that one thing he has noticed, as the company facilitates summer travel plans, is how “a lot of tourists coming from Japan are not just baseball fans, but they are bringing a lot of kids.” Specifically, he said, many grandparents are bringing their grandchildren, “wanting to show them what baseball can do.”
Mr. Oda said that his group’s upcoming trip simply means more to them now, with Mr. Ohtani playing for one of baseball’s most illustrious franchises, than it would have when he played for the Angels.
“We want to see him challenge in a new field,” said Mr. Oda, whose group is bringing children who are 10, 7, 6 and 4. “We hope to see how the Dodgers bring out the maximum potential of Ohtani and we wish to see him go beyond his limits!”
Source: nytimes.com
