MLB Plans First Official Games For South Korea To Start Next Season

In its ongoing effort to make America’s national pastime international, Major League Baseball will play official games in South Korea for the first time next season.

According to ESPN, the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres will open the season there, then return home to rest before they resume the schedule along with the other 28 clubs.

The Dodgers are no strangers to openers far from the Lower 48; they started the 2014 campaign in Australia, when Major League Baseball made its first visit Down Under.

Opening Day games have also been played in Tokyo (several times) and Mexico.

Since 1999, eight openers have been played outside of North America. The most recent occurred in 2019, when the schedule started in the Tokyo Dome.

There’s an international element to this year’s schedule too, with games scheduled for Mexico City and London. The Padres took both Mexico contests from the Giants, while the Cubs and Cardinals will meet in England next month.

Official MLB games first went outside the borders of North America in 1996, when the San Diego Padres and New York Mets met in a three-game August series in Monterrey, Mexico.

Three years later, the Colorado Rockies beat the Padres in a one-game stand at the same ballpark, Estadio de Beisbol Monterrey.

Opening Day contests were played in the Tokyo Dome in 2000, when the Cubs and Mets played their first two games there; in 2004, when the Rays met the Yankees twice; in 2008, with the Red Sox against the Athletics; and in 2012, when the A’s met the Mariners.

In 2014, the Arizona Diamondbacks played their first two games of the season against the Los Angeles Dodgers at the Sydney Cricket Ground in Australia.

Major League Baseball returned to Monterrey in 2018 with a three-game set between the Dodgers and Padres.

A year later, the two-game series between the A’s and Mariners featured the retirement of Seattle outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, an All-Star in both countries, and also marked the earliest opener in baseball history: March 20.

There were also out-of-the-ordinary games that season in both Monterrey (Cardinals vs. Reds and Astros vs. Angels) and London (Yankees vs. Red Sox).

Played at London Stadium, the Yankees-Red Sox game of June 29, 2019 attracted 59,659 fans, more than any other major-league game on foreign shores.

Plans for additional games in non-traditional venues were sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic until this season, with the first MLB games in Mexico City (Giants vs. Padres) and the resumption of the London Series (Cubs vs. Cardinals).

Starting this year, games played outside the U.S. or Canada have been branded the “MLB World Tour” by Major League Baseball.

That tour will come to Paris for the first time in 2025, with games – the first ever in mainland Europe – to be played at Stade de France. Both the Yankees and Dodgers have notified the Office of the Commissioner that they have interest in participating in the Paris games.

In addition to games in other countries, MLB has staged dozens of other games outside the United States and Canada. Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, has hosted 49 major-league games, 43 of them “home games” for the attendance-challenged Montreal Expos, a franchise that became the Washington Nationals in 2005.

Of the six non-Expos games, the Mets and Marlins met in three of them – a series played in 2010. The history of internationally-staged games includes one no-hitter (May 4, 2018, four Dodgers pitchers blanking the Padres) and one extra-inning game.

Official dates for the South Korea games have not been announced but they will be early enough to allow both teams to return home for a rest before resuming the regular season, just as the Dodgers and Diamondbacks did when they played in Australia.