I’m departing this afternoon out of O’Hare Airport in Chicago to fly to Japan to see the Cubs face the Dodgers in the 2025 season opening Tokyo Series. (If you’re interested in tracking it, I’m on United flight 881, scheduled to leave about 2:10 p.m. CT.)
Time sometimes passes slowly, but I am finding it hard to believe that it’s been a quarter century — 25 years — since I made a similar trip to Tokyo to see the Cubs and Mets play. Those were the first MLB games played in Asia. The Cubs wound up splitting the pair. The 2000 season did not turn out well for our favorite team, as they would lose 97 games and go 16-42 (yikes!) after July 31.
This year, of course, we hope things go better for the Cubs. This team is a far better club than the 2000 version, and should be better than last year’s, too. I’ll talk more about that before the North American opener against the Diamondbacks March 27.
In the meantime, I’m spending 10 days in Japan and will attend the Cubs vs. Yomiuri Giants exhibition game Sunday, before the Cubs/Dodgers series. Beyond that I’m planning to re-visit some of the sights I saw in 2000, including the Imperial Palace, Meiji Shrine, Hakone, and also get on the bullet train to see Kyoto. So you’ll get some non-baseball travelogues here as well as coverage of the ballgames.
Here’s what I wrote, lightly edited, five years ago on the 20th anniversary of the first Cubs/Mets game in Japan on March 29, 2000.
The Cubs and Mets were chosen for that series in part because their two biggest stars at the time, Sammy Sosa and Mike Piazza, were extremely popular in Japan. While I was in Tokyo and environs I saw Sosa’s image on everything from cellphone lanyards to billboards to the sides of various food items in 7-11 stores.
Each club was to be the “home” team for one game, and so it was that for that first game it was the Mets “hosting” the Cubs at the Tokyo Dome. The sellout crowd included the Japanese royal family. While I was in Tokyo, I heard that it was the first time any of them had ever attended a professional baseball game.
The Tokyo Dome (the locals call it “The Big Egg” because of its white roof) is similar in shape and seating to the Metrodome in Minneapolis. For years, Tokyo Dome sellout crowds were announced as 55,000, and that was the number announced for this game’s crowd.
Several years later, it was revealed that Japanese teams often fudged attendance figures and that the real capacity of the Tokyo Dome is about 46,000.
At most NPB games Japanese fans bring noisemakers and musical instruments to cheer for their teams. Apparently, they were told — no one seemed to want to take credit or blame for this, although rumor has it MLB was behind the decision — to leave those at home for this series. Thus, since neither the Mets nor Cubs had a native rooting interest in Tokyo, most of the Japanese fans were unusually quiet during this game. The only real loud cheers for either team came from the area where I was sitting, where there were a lot of Americans, Cubs and Mets fans who had made the trip.
Back then, MLB didn’t have a way for season-ticket holders of the teams involved to buy tickets for games like this and online ticket purchasing was in its infancy, so I had bought my tickets through a travel agency in New York City, and it seemed like most American fans were seated in the same general area. The ticket price was ¥10,000. At the time, that was equivalent to about $90. That doesn’t seem like very much today for a seat for an event like that in this location (about 20 rows off the field):
Al Yellon
Keep in mind, though, that the average price for a seat comparable to that at Wrigley Field 25 years ago was about $25. This was my ticket for that first Cubs/Mets game:
A few notes about the game itself: Behind the solid pitching of Jon Lieber, who threw seven strong innings, the Cubs beat the Mets 5-3. Since this was the first game of the 2000 MLB season, for a day the Cubs were first place by themselves in the N.L. Central.
The Cubs hitting hero of the game was Shane Andrews, who hit the first home run by a North American player in an MLB game in Japan off the Mets’ Dennis Cook in the seventh inning, extending the Cubs’ 2-1 lead to 4-1. It was also the first home run of the 2000s.
Andrews had two hits and three RBI. Mark Grace also homered to give the Cubs their final run in the eighth inning, and Joe Girardi chipped in with three hits in a 12-hit offensive attack. The Cubs might have scored even more runs as they drew 10 walks off Mets pitching and left 13 men on base.
Here is Andrews’ home run [VIDEO].
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And here’s Grace’s blast [VIDEO].
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And that’s the story of the very first Cubs game played in Japan. They wound up losing the second game, 5-1 in 11 innings, when Mets outfielder Benny Agbayani hit a grand slam off Danny Young, and you’ll be forgiven if you don’t remember Young, who pitched in only four games for the Cubs and then spent the rest of 2000 at Triple-A Iowa.
This year, of course, the stakes are higher for the Cubs, who expect to contend for the NL Central title, and the Tokyo Series has a much higher profile, largely because of the five Japanese star players coming to play in their home country for the Cubs and Dodgers.
Heading out this afternoon. Can’t wait!
AloJapan.com