SEOUL – As Seoul prepares to host one of the most hotly anticipated Major League Baseball (MLB) season openers ever in March, its mayor is seeking to make MLB games regular events in South Korea.
Fans hoping to see new Dodgers players Shohei “Shotime” Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto go up against Yu Darvish and Kim Ha-seong of San Diego Padres poured online on the first day of ticket sales to try and secure seats.
The quota available for MLB’s first-ever, regular-season game in South Korea on March 20 sold out in the first hour.
“There are a lot of baseball fans in Seoul and it’s a very attractive city, so the MLB proposed that it would like to hold the opening games here and, of course, we agreed,” Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, 63, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.
“And MLB expressed its intention to visit regularly in the future if this event goes well.”
The Seoul Series will be a chance for South Korea and MLB to work together to revive professional baseball’s popularity.
The games are also part of an effort by the capital to attract more visitors, as the end of the pandemic helps travel take off globally.
Seoul will be hosting games that mark Ohtani’s debut with the Dodgers after he signed a US$700 million (S$942.2 million) contract. That may rekindle interest in a sport that has seen a decrease in South Korean fans, especially among younger people.
Their preference often is to go online and play e-sport games, particularly after Covid-19 forced them to look for entertainment options at home, according to Jeon Yong-bae, a sports management professor at Dankook University, south of Seoul.
Tickets to the Seoul Series are hard to come by, though, because its venue, Gocheok Sky Dome, has fewer than 17,000 seats. That is about a third of Dodger Stadium and also smaller than Tokyo Dome, which has more than 40,000 seats for baseball.
Seoul is trying to make more space for sports viewing. A facility used for the 1988 Seoul Olympics is being renovated as Jamsil Sports MICE Complex, offering about 46,000 seats. There are also plans to build a new dome stadium that can accommodate about 30,000 people, Mr Oh said.
He visited Rogers Centre, the home of the Toronto Blue Jays with a retractable roof and an adjoining hotel. Seoul is using that venue as a “benchmark” and “perhaps, in five to six years, we will be able to enjoy games in such a state-of-the-art dome stadium”, he said.
Mr Oh’s target is for 15 million overseas tourists to visit Seoul in 2024, more than the 12 million in normal years, and his longer-term goal is to double the figure to 30 million. BLOOMBERG
