Dodgers owner Todd Boehly thinks the Shohei Ohtani-led team is the ‘obvious choice’ to take baseball global—if only MLB would let him profit from it
When the Los Angeles Dodgers square off against the Chicago Cubs for the Major League Baseball season opener in Japan’s Tokyo Dome this Tuesday, Dodgers co-owner Todd Boehly will watch with mixed emotions.
No doubt he’ll revel in the spectacle. Thanks to a pitching roster that includes three of Japan’s biggest stars—Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, and super-slugger Shohei Ohtani—Japanese fans practically think of the Dodgers as their national team. The Dodgers’ World Series victory over the New York Yankees last year drew an average of 12.9 million Japanese viewers; Game Two in that series had more Japanese viewers than Americans. Tickets for Tuesday’s game and a second on Wednesday sold out instantly, with premium seats on the re-sale market changing hands for as much as $20,000. The roar of the crowd inside the 50,000-seat “Big Egg” will be thunderous. Millions more Japanese will tune into the games on television. The Japanese media, which covers the Dodgers obsessively, is sure to whip itself into a frenzy.
But Boehly’s ability to appreciate all that excitement will be tempered by frustration that the Dodgers can’t cash in on it. The Dodgers, he argues, are the “obvious choice” to lead an effort to take MLB global—in a market where America’s national pastime has long been more popular than it is in the country where it was invented. Boehly sees that as a huge opportunity, not just to sell merchandise and broadcast rights, but to create high-tech, interactive experiences, where Japanese fans can virtually step up to the plate against Ohtani, or re-enact Freddie Freeman’s dramatic World Series grand slam. “We are confident we could do something in Tokyo and Osaka that would bring in a couple of million people every year,” Boehly says.
It won’t happen, he laments, because long-standing MLB rules stipulate that revenue collected from markets outside the U.S. must be shared equally among all 30 teams in the league. “If we’re told that we get only 3% of the business, that makes it hard to justify the investment. For us to plant Dodger-branded flags in Tokyo—which we’d love to do—Major League Baseball needs to figure that out.”
Todd Boehly, speaks at the 2024 Forbes Iconoclast Summit at Cipriani Wall Street on June 20, 2024 in New York City.
Steven Ferdman—Getty Images
Figuring that out, as Boehly sees it, will require the MLB to recognize that it has an archaic governance structure that prevents the league from adapting to change and capitalizing on new opportunities. “When the constitution of baseball was written and all these agreements were made, the idea of global sports in a world where information and news moved around at the speed of light was just unfathomable,” he argues. Under MLB’s legacy rules, many of which were designed to reduce the advantages of better financed, free-spending teams like the Dodgers and Yankees, even minor changes in the way the league operates require the approval of 22 out of the league’s 30 teams. Boehly thinks that is too high a bar.
Boehly, a champion wrestler in high school and college, began his career in finance. But his knack for spotting and exploiting governance failure has helped him build a multi-billion-dollar sports and entertainment empire that includes some of the world’s most lucrative franchises. In addition to his 20% personal stake in the Dodgers, Boehly is co-owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, and co-controlling owner and chairman of the Chelsea Football Club. Through his holding company, Eldridge Industries, his investments in the entertainment industry include Penske Media (owner of The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Rolling Stone, and Billboard); Dick Clark
Productions (the wor
ld’s largest producer and proprietor of live television programming); Fullwell Productions (producer of “The Big Bang Theory”); as well as licensing rights to the songs of Bruce Springsteen. In 2023, Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions acquired the assets of the Golden Globe Awards, prizing them away in contested takeover from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the non-profit group that had run the awards for eight decades.
In growing that empire, Boehly has developed a consistent management playbook. He is impatient with outdated rules, willing to make huge and often heavily leveraged bets, and takes an unsentimental, asset managers’ approach to balancing risk.
