SEOUL — Watch the scene that stirred Monday afternoon here, and the homecoming that San Diego Padres shortstop Ha-Seong Kim cemented with a pair of home runs in his return to Gocheok Skydome, and it clicked. Said Padres manager Mike Shildt: “Can’t script it much better.”
The same goes for the club occupying the home dugout this week in Seoul. It’s been 30 years since Chan Ho Park debuted for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are in South Korea with a new traveling band of superstars that only added to the franchise’s appeal in the region. In spending more than $1 billion to acquire transcontinental superstars Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, each born just a short flight away in Japan, the team has well established its place as the preeminent major-league club this side of the Pacific.
“These two teams are a perfect match,” Jeremiah Yolkut, Major League Baseball’s vice president of global events, told The Athletic ahead of the first MLB regular-season games ever in South Korea.
The opening game starts Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Korea, or 6 a.m. ET in the United States. Here’s how the teams wound up here:
What does this mean for the teams?
A project that started in earnest three to four years ago couldn’t have lined up much better.
For the Padres, Kim gets to return to the same ballpark where he starred with the Korea Baseball Organization’s Kiwoom Heroes. It also marked a chance for free-agent signee Woo Suk Go to square off in exhibition action against the same LG Twins squad he closed out a KBO title with just last season.
For the Dodgers, there’s a global stage to launch one of their most highly anticipated seasons ever and a chance to tap further into a market that, as manager Dave Roberts put it, the organization wants to “paint blue.”
How did MLB settle on Korea?
As Major League Baseball charted out its next batch of international games following the ratification of the newest collective bargaining agreement, an obvious market emerged: Asia, where the league last opened a regular season in 2019 with a Seattle Mariners–Oakland Athletics series in Tokyo.
And while a return to Japan and its vast market share made sense — and appears to be in the cards again for 2025 — South Korea, and particularly Seoul, quickly emerged as a contender.
The city, and Gocheok Skydome, had previously partnered with the league to host part of the opening rounds of the 2017 World Baseball Classic, a test case to see if the city and facility had the proper infrastructure for potential future games. Additional work continued once the selection was finalized, including refurbishing the turf fields and ensuring enough clubhouse and weight room space to house full-fledged games.
“It’s just making sure we have everything as needed so that the Dodgers and Padres really wouldn’t know the difference between playing here and playing back in the States,” Yolkut said.
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How is the Korea Series being received?
Tickets to South Korea’s first major-league regular-season games reportedly sold out within an hour. Ohtani’s Dodgers debut and Kim’s return to his home ballpark were too much to resist.
But the market’s overall viability and growth, the league hopes, will be spotlighted over the entire week, with Yolkut pointing to the exhibitions each team played against the Heroes, Twins and Team Korea over the past few days as an example.
When Heroes right-hander Ariel Jurado, who pitched parts of three seasons in the majors with the Texas Rangers and New York Mets, struck out Ohtani twice in his exhibition, he hoped scouts were able to watch. When Kiwoom third baseman Sung Mun Song drove a two-run double off the wall in his taste of major-league action, he called it “the best day ever of my life,”…
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