Having the regular season start before Opening Day is a prospect as indulgent as it is unreal—once you’re up early to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers play the Chicago Cubs at 6 a.m. ET, you may as well buy in, even if the game had a nasty spring training hangover. No pitcher was fully stretched out. The Hanshin Tigers shut out the Dodgers and Cubs in back-to-back exhibition games just two days ago; Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman were out with ailment and injury for this morning’s lower bracket match-up. There wasn’t much, as far as glimpses into how each team would look throughout the rest of the regular season go.
This is not a complaint. The only thing better than one Opening Day is two, and the soft power exchange of MLB with Pokémon meant that no fewer than six Pikachus dressed in baseball jerseys were placidly bobbling about the diamond for the teams’ on-field introductions. Novelty value aside, Joe Davis gave a brief history of Japanese baseball as cultural exchange; Japanese baseball legend Sadaharu Oh was present for the game. If it didn’t quite feel like regular season baseball, well—that was hardly the most important part. Last year’s Seoul Series, for all its splendor, was overshadowed by the news of Ippei Mizuhara’s gambling scandal. This year, there was just baseball and Cool Japan, and the fans in the stadium got a little bit of everything.
It is a little unjust that the game will qualify as a home game for the Cubs, who, while no slouches, were down on the Dodgers in both headcount of Japanese stars and overarching popularity. The Cubs started former Yokohama BayStar Shota Imanaga, while the Dodgers started former Orix Buffalo Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Former Hiroshima Toyo Carp Seiya Suzuki would not bat until second in the Chicago lineup, but former Nippon-Ham Fighter Shohei Ohtani faced Imanaga for the first plate appearance of the MLB season. When asked before the game what pitch he would throw to Ohtani, Imanaga declined to answer via a rock-paper-scissors analogy, in a way you would expect from someone nicknamed Mike Imanaga II. “But I can probably say the 25th pitch,” Imanaga continued. “Paper.”
The answer to the first question wound up being a fastball up in the zone, and the result was a generously called strike, which set the tone for the first four innings. (As for that 25th pitch, it turned out to be a splitter to Enrique Hernández.) Imanaga pitched four hitless, scoreless innings, and was pulled after his 69th pitch. Up 1–0, the Cubs replaced Imanaga with Ben Brown, a pitcher in the classically lanky style, and then the Dodgers ended the no-hitter by doing what they do: wearing down pitchers until something gives. Naturally, the first to do it was Ohtani himself.
As it turns out, who needs Betts and Freeman when you have Tommy Edman and Teoscar Hernández to round out the top of your lineup? The Dodgers plunked together enough singles, in combination with a Jon Berti error, to take a 3–1 lead in the fifth inning. After Yamamoto closed out the fifth—ending his start with one earned run, three hits, and four strikeouts—the Dodgers unleashed their parade of vastly competent relief pitchers. Anthony Banda threw a hitless, walkless inning before passing the baton to Ben Casparius, who threw one of his own before passing the baton to Blake Treinin, who threw one of his own before passing the baton to Tanner Scott, who threw one of his own and, in the process, incidentally notched his first save as a Dodger.
The Dodgers won 4–1 with two hits from Ohtani—and, actually, maybe it is possible to draw a conclusion about the regular season from the game anyway. If the newly Ohtani-fied Dodgers first win in Korea last season portended something ominous for the league, than what to make of this victory, with the Dodgers missing two of their best bats in Betts and Freeman?
Fortunately, the unreality of the game makes it easier not to think about, if you don’t want to. What conclusions can or should you really draw about the broader context of the season or all of history at 9 a.m. ET? It’s better to blearily take in the game just as it was. Two great pitchers pitched two gems even with their limited pitch counts, Ohtani displayed some great hitting even if he didn’t get a home run, and after the game, the six Pikachus, evenly representing the Dodgers and Cubs, peacefully hung out on the field together. Isn’t that cute!
