While the Yankees and Braves may argue over who is “America’s team,” and the Brewers and Cubs may argue about who is Kenosha’s team, the Dodgers are doing baseball at a totally different level. 

With the signing of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani the Dodgers have set themselves up as Japan’s team.

While much of the rest of the baseball world deals with reduction in revenue from existing cable TV contracts and fans that haven’t quite come back from pre-covid attendance levels, the Dodgers have the opportunity to explore how to develop revenue from adding 125.7 million people to their potential fanbase.  

Everyone else is trying to figure out how to win within the rules.  The Dodgers will be living by their own rules.  Yes, the Dodgers will go over the salary cap and have to pay the other owners some money.  But they won’t care.  The Los Angeles Dodgers have monopolized the Asian marketplace for the next ten years. 

The potential revenue from these signings is massive:

In Stadium Advertising and Tourist Attendance:  It is estimated that Japanese firms spent over $1 billion Yen or $141M on in stadium advertising while Ohtani was in Anaheim. Although this won’t double with the signing of Yamamoto it will likely increase with them both in LA. Don’t be surprised if you see more Japanese signage at Dodger Stadium than English ones.  And I could see a massive deal to rename the stadium itself. The Dodgers will make back more than the salaries, signing bonuses and any luxury tax payments out of Japanese advertising alone.  

Regional Broadcast Streaming: Bally is going down. What replaces it is still unknown and isn’t of particular interest to the Dodgers as the Dodgers work with SportsNet LA for distribution rights.  But what the Bally demise will do is force the MLB to take a look at how “local” broadcasts are provided and monetized via streaming? This opens the door for LA to garner substantial revenue for streaming games live to their Japanese fanbase. The final decision may include MLB as an intermediary for streaming; but I believe team’s viewership will still impact a team's share of "regional revenue." No one else will have a whole country as a fan base for streaming games.  

Playing in Japan: The Dodgers will go to Japan and generate a ton of money. It may not be a regular season game in the next few years, but it will be exhibition games or a few showcases. The sponsorship money for bringing these two megastars back to Japan will be huge. 

Additional talent:  The LA Dodgers have set themselves up as the team to play for if you are Asian.  This is likely just the start of the Dodgers signing Japanese players. They will continue this trend and strengthen the marketing platform. 

It is difficult to know exactly how valuable these signings will be for the Dodgers. The Angels kept pretty quiet about how much revenue was being generated by having Ohtani. But this isn’t a situation where the Dodgers expect to just break even. The Dodgers will make considerable bank from overseas that will eclipse the salary expenses by more than $100M a year. The revenue generated from these two players will be more than the Brewers annual salary budget.    

Could the Brewers have pulled this off? Not very likely. The Dodgers provided a west coast setting as close to Japan as possible. They have the budget to buy players to put around these superstars. And they are already a known entity to the Japanese marketplace. The Brewers have none of these things. 

The Brewers do get a piece of the revenue sharing produced by the Dodgers becoming Japan’s team. This is a piece of the shared revenue for Los Angeles becoming and continuing to be a luxury tax team as well as some portion of national media and playoff telecast monies generated in Japan that funnels through MLB. This is trickle-down economics in the world of baseball.

The Dodgers saw an opportunity and pounced. Good for them. And a little bit good for the rest of MLB. But this will only make the playing field less even for small market teams. If MLB ever truly wants a level playing field here in the USA more revenue sharing will have to be implemented or the Dodgers will just keep raking in the cash as Japan’s Baseball team.