All-Star Game a showcase for surging popularity of Japanese-born players

ATLANTA -- A 2025 season that began at the Tokyo Dome makes a prominent pit stop here at an All-Star Game featuring a record-tying three Japanese-born players in Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Dodgers and Yusei Kikuchi of the Angels.

And those stars only scratch the surface of the potentially historic impact being made by those who made the trek past the Pacific.

It is appropriate, 30 years after Hideo Nomo’s sea-changing arrival to MLB from Nippon Professional Baseball and in the year that Ichiro Suzuki takes his rightful spot in Cooperstown’s hallowed Hall of Fame, that the popularity and prominence of Japanese players has never been stronger.

“I grew up watching amazing Japanese players play on this stage,” said Ohtani through an interpreter, “so I hope that I can be that kind of example to the future Japanese players.”

This game Tuesday night at Truist Park -- like any game featuring Ohtani -- figures to attract a big audience in Japan.

They’ll have a lot to root for:

• Ohtani, who unsurprisingly topped the NL in fan votes and, also unsurprisingly, has the No. 1-selling jersey in the league this year. He will of course start for the NL at DH after heading into the break with the NL’s highest home run total (32) and OPS (.987).
• Yamamoto, Ohtani’s right-handed Dodgers teammate who has gone a long way toward justifying the largest pitching pact in the sport with his first All-Star season (2.59 ERA, 157 ERA+ in 19 starts).
• And Kikuchi, the left-handed Angels ace who, at age 34 and with a 3.11 ERA and 137 ERA+ for the Halos, is an All-Star for the first time since his 2021 season.

These three Japanese-born All-Stars tie the record set in 2003 (Hideki Matsui, Ichiro and Shigetoshi Hasegawa) and matched in 2007 (Hideki Okajima, Takashi Saito and Ichiro), 2014 (Masahiro Tanaka, Yu Darvish and Koji Uehara) and 2021 (Kikuchi, Darvish and Ohtani).

“We want to be an inspiration,” Kikuchi said through an interpreter.

Truth is, several other Japanese players easily could have joined that trio in Atlanta this week.

It would not be at all difficult to make an All-Star case for Mets right-hander Kodai Senga, who, despite missing a month with a hamstring issue, has posted a sparkling 1.39 ERA and 274 ERA+ in 14 starts this season.

Or Cubs lefty Shota Imanaga, who also was sidelined for a significant stretch with a hamstring injury but nevertheless has a 2.65 ERA in 12 starts and has quietly put up one of the 14 best ERA+ marks in MLB over the past two seasons (139) among those with at least 200 innings in that span.

And perhaps the most overlooked Japanese star of all was Cubs DH Seiya Suzuki, whose 146 OPS+ ranks 14th among all MLB qualifiers.

Let’s also not forget that while center fielder Jung Hoo Lee, who cooled after a hot start but has nonetheless had a breakout season for the Giants, first embarked upon his professional path in the Korean Baseball Organization, he was born in Nagoya.

To get a truer sense of the impact an island country a world away has made on MLB this year, we have to use Wins Above Replacement.

Per FanGraphs’ calculations, the highest combined WAR total for players born in Japan was 24.7 in 2007, which featured 16 such players.

Using those same calculations, the 14 Japanese-born players in 2025 have combined to produce 15.2 fWAR, with 59.5% of scheduled games in the books. So we are ahead of that 2007 pace.

“Every year, we get more Japanese players coming here and playing in the big leagues,” Yamamoto said through an interpreter. “When I think about it, I appreciate and am very thankful for the Japanese players that came here before us and paved the path for us. That’s very special.”

When Nomo started the All-Star Game for the NL 30 years ago, that scoreless, two-inning appearance and the surrounding phenomenon known as “Nomomania” turned the baseball world on its head.

Nomo was the second Japanese-born player in MLB history and the first in several decades, and he had to use some daring creativity to convince his NPB team to “retire” him so that he could be eligible to sign with the Dodgers. The Nomo situation helped inspire the posting system we know today.

Then, in 2001, came Ichiro, who broke through as the first Japanese-born position player in MLB and later this month will be saluted as the first Asian-born player to have a forever home in the Hall’s precious Plaque Gallery.

“All the people around my age, it was really fun to watch him, and I was inspired by him personally,” Kikuchi said. “I just want to say thank you to Ichiro.”

Ohtani is now in the midst of reinventing what is possible not just for the Japanese-born player but any modern player. But as we see in this All-Star Game and the rest of a league that now takes those NPB stars and statistics much more seriously than it once did, Japan produces far more than just a unique two-way unicorn.

This is the third straight year that “Baseball’s Bridge Across the Pacific,” a traveling exhibit celebrating the rich history of baseball in Japan, is a part of the All-Star festivities, at Capital One All-Star Village. The Hall of Fame just unveiled “Yakyu/Baseball,” its own Japanese history exhibit in connection with Ichiro’s induction.

Make no mistake, though, we’re also witnessing living history. The game has never had a stronger trans-Pacific reach. The 2024 World Series featuring Ohtani and Yamamoto’s Dodgers shattered viewership records in Japan, and the two-game Tokyo Series amazingly averaged more than 24 million viewers in a country with a population of about 124.5 million.

As young Dodgers pitching phenom Roki Sasaki tries to get back to full health after a shoulder injury and live up to his promise and the industry awaits the potential offseason posting of Tokyo Yakult Swallows star third baseman Munetaka Murakami, another crop of stars could emerge.

For now, this All-Star Game is a moment to appreciate how far the game has come, how that bridge across the Pacific that pioneers like Nomo and Ichiro nurtured has truly never been so fruitful.