The 2025 Major League Baseball season began at 6:10 a.m. Eastern on Monday in the Tokyo Dome. After tuneups against NPB teams, the Cubs and Dodgers played a game that counted, though it still featured telltale signs of mid-March rust. Below, some notes on the game (and, more importantly, managerial eyewear).
First Inning
The first pitch of the game, Shota Imanaga to Shohei Ohtani, is a four-seam fastball for a called strike. The K-Zone graphic says it’s way too high. Statcast says it’s perfectly located at the top of the zone. Ohtani doesn’t challenge. This isn’t spring training anymore.
Both the Chicago and Los Angeles broadcasts have the crowd noise dialed way down, which is a shame. For all the talk of the electric atmosphere, the crowd registers as faint background noise, an oscillating fan in the other room.
Second Inning
In the top of the second, Imanaga walks the first two Dodgers and shakes his head in anger. In the dugout, Craig Counsell reaches for his spectacles.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto is having trouble locating too. In the bottom half, Dansby Swanson stays back and drives a curveball back up the middle. It’s the first hit of the season. Miguel Amaya doubles him home with a liner to right center. It’s the first run of the season. Yamamoto gets out of the inning by dotting a curve at the bottom of the zone to freeze Jon Berti. It doesn’t quite seem fair.
Third Inning
Imanaga leads Ohtani off with a high, hanging sweeper. It stays inside, and Ohtani tries and fails to let his elbow drift into it. “This has gotta be a splitter right here,” says Clayton Kershaw up in the booth when the count gets to 2-2. It’s another high sweeper, and Ohtani smashes it right at the second baseman for a lineout. Kershaw feels vindicated; he didn’t predict the pitch correctly, but the pitch he didn’t predict got crushed.
Ian Happ chops Yamamoto’s first pitch straight into the ground. A backpedaling Yamamoto reaches up and biffs it with the tip of his glove, slowing it down just enough that the second baseman can’t catch Happ.
Michael Busch’s bat looks like it’s as old as he is. The black finish is all nicked and scuffed, like he spent the offseason using it to knock the side of the TV when the reception got fuzzy. It’s the only thing on the screen that isn’t shiny and new. He grounds out on a splitter just like everyone else.
Fourth Inning
A giant screen behind home plate advertises a company called dip, all lowercase. If we’re lucky, we will never have to think about this company again.
Imanaga walks two more batters. Pitching coach Tommy Hottovy, a dark horse contender for the best name in baseball, walks out to say hello. Enrique Hernández lifts the first fly ball of the game, a deep out to center field.
Counsell picks up the phone. The Dodgers still don’t have a hit. Imanaga’s night is done.
Fifth Inning
The center field camera is lower than usual. It gives a nice view of the strike zone, and it has the added benefit of making the pitcher look larger than life. Ben Brown appears to be releasing the ball approximately eight inches from home plate.
The action picks up. Strikeout. Walk. Ohtani rips a single into right field. First and third, first hit of the game for the Dodgers. Ohtani and first base coach Chris Woodward lean in close, turn, and gently touch helmets.
Tommy Edman sends a dying liner into left. Happ lays out but can only trap it. First and second, tie ballgame. Teoscar Hernández hits a chopper to Matt Shaw at third. He throws to second to get the force, but Berti makes the turn and throws the ball away, allowing Ohtani to score from second. Will Smith chops one through the left side, and it’s a 3-1 game. Hottovy returns to the mound. Brown has a moustache as fine as cornsilk.
Max Muncy’s bat is painted industrial gray. He chases a big curveball in the dirt, then drops the bat in the dirt.
Yamamoto induces a couple hard groundballs. Miguel Rojas makes a nice play deep in the hole at short. Enrique Hernández makes a nice play deep in the hole at first, which isn’t something you get to say very often. Yamamoto punches Happ out with a fastball on the corner.
Sixth Inning
Yamamoto receives congratulations in the dugout. His night is done after five innings: one run, three hits, four strikeouts, one walk.
Ohtani comes up with two on and two out. You can finally hear the crowd for a moment. Brown strikes him out on three pitches. The crowd gasps.
With lefties due up for the Cubs, Anthony Banda replaces Yamamoto. There’s a little bit of Roy Hobbs in his delivery; it’s the way he swings his arms upward at the beginning. Three up, three down.
Seventh Inning
Brown is still out there, and when the Dodgers aren’t hitting him, he looks unhittable. But he’s profligate, requiring 65 pitches to get through 2 2/3 innings. He issues a two-out walk, and Counsell emerges from the dugout, glasses hooked on the collar of his jersey. Eli Morgan is everything Brown isn’t: short, dark-haired, economical. Muncy chops his first pitch to second base and the inning is over.
The crowd murmurs when Swanson lifts a Ben Casparius fastball into the right field corner, but Teoscar Hernández eventually drifts over to make the play. Pete Crow-Armstrong whiffs and sends his bat cartwheeling back toward the dugout.
Eighth Inning
With one out in the eighth, umpire Bill Miller stops the game because of a fan with a laser pointer in the left field stands. After play resumes, Michael Conforto drives a ball down the left field line for a double. For the third year in a row, the Dodgers are celebrating their doubles with the Freddie Freeman dance. Freeman was a last minute scratch with a rib injury. Attempting his own dance would probably leave him in agony right now.
“Day-O,” sings Harry Belafonte. Halfway through the crowd’s response, whoever’s in charge of the sound mix finally turns up the crowd noise for a moment. They dial down the fun again as soon as the call and response has finished.
Blake Treinen hits Berti on the forearm and the ball ricochets into Smith behind the plate for good measure. All of a sudden, the Cubs have the tying run at the plate. Berti steals second easily. Seiya Suzuki, 0-for-3 on the night, comes to the plate with two outs. He could be the hero. The crowd roars when Suzuki fouls a fastball into the stands on the first base side, but Treinen catches him way out in front on a sweeper, resulting in a weak liner to third.
“Thank you,” says Treinen to his God as he walks off the mound. Miller meets Treinen on the third base line and chats him up as he pats his pitching hand.
Ninth Inning
Ohtani hooks another base hit down the line, this one a line drive double off a Ryan Brasier slider. As is so often the case, Ohtani looks awkward, completely off balance, like he just reached out to poke the ball, but it comes off the bat at 107.8 mph. An Edman groundout and a Teoscar Hernández single bring Ohtani home, extending the lead to 4-1. Brasier gets into more trouble, gets out of it.
The Dodgers have chosen to forgo the gold trim with which World Series champions are allowed to accent their uniforms. The only gaudy touch is the MLB logo on the back of the jersey, which has had its white negative space gilded.
The other indicator of the Dodgers’ dominance, the addition that takes them from great to downright decadent, comes in from the bullpen. Tanner Scott sets the Cubs down in order, and just like that, Los Angeles is in first place once again.
