MLB's Oshi-Katsu Business: Bobbleheads, Promo Days and the Ohtani Economy

At some MLB games, every fan through the gate gets a bobblehead, a nodding-head figurine of a player. A free, limited-edition giveaway like that gives fans a reason to pick that particular night.

What is on offer, and on what terms, can decide which game a fan buys a ticket for. Using 2025 data and cases tied to Shohei Ohtani, we look at how giveaways relate to attendance. Think of it as a stadium version of a limited-edition photocard: the perk goes only to people who physically show up. This article compares two ways of turning that impulse into a business, MLB’s and Japan’s oshi-katsu, the practice of organizing your time and money around the person or team you love.

The Short Version: MLB Makes Getting Through the Gate the Entrance to Oshi-Katsu

MLB’s business isn’t designed to make its profit by selling merchandise. Free giveaways create the reason to show up, and the money comes back through concessions, parking, sponsor advertising and broadcast rights. In Japan, oshi-katsu spending tends to concentrate on merchandise, on the idea that spending on your oshi is how you show love. MLB puts the entry point of spending somewhere else: the fact that you were in the ballpark that day.

That is why fans end up with collections they don’t remember buying. The passion this design generates is a lot like Japan’s culture of collecting can badges and trading cards, but the money behind it comes from an entirely different place.

MLB

Give first

• Free giveaway for everyone through the gate
• Money returns via concessions, parking, sponsors, broadcasts

Japanese oshi-katsu

Sell first

• Paid, limited merchandise
• Spending itself is the expression of love

The difference is where the spending starts, not how much fans care.

History: From Bat Day to Bobblehead Night

Bobbleheads and giveaways both began as small tricks to give fans a reason to come to the ballpark that day. Over 70 years they have become attendance infrastructure for the whole league. For a fuller explanation of the terms, see What Is a Bobblehead? and What Is a Giveaway Promotion Day?.

1. 1952Bat DaySt. Louis Browns; the giveaway starting point
2. 1999Willie Mays bobbleheadGiants hand out bobbleheads
3. November 2025Back-to-back titlesDodgers win a second World Series

A small trick to fill seats on one night became league-wide infrastructure.

The Structure: Who Pays for the Merchandise?

The cost of giveaway items is usually covered by sponsor companies. Tens of thousands of bobbleheads carrying a company logo go out, and every one of them sits on a fan’s shelf for years. As advertising, that lasts far longer than a billboard or a TV commercial.

The foundation that makes this work is the league’s enormous revenue.

• League revenue: A record $12.1 billion in 2024, and an estimated $12.5 billion or so for the 2025 season (Forbes)
• Attendance: 71,409,421 in the 2025 season, up for the third year in a row. The Dodgers drew more than 4 million for the first time in franchise history (4,012,470) (Forbes)
• Sponsorship revenue: $2.05 billion across all MLB clubs in 2025, up 9% from the previous year and 68% from 2022 (Forbes)

Giveaway items are the bait set at the entrance to this revenue structure. The time horizon differs from that of Japanese clubs, which aim for a one-year profit on merchandise.

1. 01Sponsor paysBuys the logo's time on the shelf
2. 02Free giveawayHanded out at the gate
3. 03Fans show upA reason to pick that night
4. 04Revenue returnsFood, parking, ads, broadcasts

↻ and back to the start

The giveaway is an advertising slot for the sponsor, not a discount.

$2.05B

Sponsorship revenue, all clubs

+9%

Versus the previous year

+68%

Versus 2022

20 of 76

Dodgers sponsors that are Japanese

Source: Forbes

Ohtani Connected the Japanese Market to the League

Shohei Ohtani, who signed with the Dodgers in the 2023 offseason for $700 million over ten years, rewrote the club’s revenue structure.

In 2024 alone, his first year with the team, the club’s sponsorship revenue rose by $70 million. In 2025 the Dodgers signed 76 sponsors, and 20 of them were Japanese companies. The club’s annual sponsorship revenue was reported to be on track to top $200 million, a first in North American pro sports (Forbes).

Ohtani’s own off-field income is in a class of its own. His sponsorship and licensing income reached $100 million in 2025, the highest of any MLB player, at roughly ten times the level of those ranked below him (Sportico). His jersey sales ranked first in all of MLB for three straight years since 2023 (CBS Sports).

People’s movements have changed too. According to estimates from the Los Angeles tourism board, 80 to 90% of Japanese visitors go to Dodger Stadium at least once during their stay, and the number of visitors from Japan to Los Angeles was about 230,000 in 2023, before Ohtani joined the Dodgers, up 91.7% year over year (CNN) (SFGate). Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University, calculated Ohtani’s 2025 economic impact on the Dodgers at about ¥130.2 billion (roughly $870 million; a yen-denominated estimate covering the run up to the division title) (Full-Count, in Japanese).

In oshi-katsu terms, this is the internationalization of ensei (traveling to see your oshi). The destination for “going to see your oshi” has moved across the Pacific, and Japanese consumer spending now flows directly into the club’s revenue.

What’s the Same and What’s Different From Japanese Oshi-Katsu

What they share is the path of “meet through the group (the club), deepen through the individual (the player).” The compatibility-quiz service from the Nippon-Ham Fighters that we covered in Pro Baseball and Oshi-Katsu and MLB’s player-specific bobblehead giveaways aim at nearly the same thing. The difference is that Japan has fans buy in and measures their passion that way, while MLB gives first, to widen the pool.

Another big difference is cheering etiquette. Japanese stands bring everyone’s voices together with trumpets and drums, while MLB stands are basically made up of individuals. You won’t feel out of place if you haven’t learned the calls or chants. In fact, the barrier to a first game is somewhat lower than in Japan.

Steps for Planning a Trip to a Game

• Check giveaway dates and theme days on the club’s official “Promotional Schedule”
• Giveaways are usually first come, first served. Find out from local information how many hours before the gates open to line up
• Prices on the resale market spike for marquee games. For Game 1 of the Tokyo Series in March 2025, the cheapest tickets rose to $2,080 and the most expensive to more than $18,000 (AS USA)
• Prioritize the club’s official resale function for tickets (to avoid scams and counterfeits)
• Reselling giveaway items is banned by many clubs. Check the terms before you put extras into a trade

If you’re after giveaway items, weeknight games tend to have shorter lines. Popular players’ models are an exception, though, and lines can form three hours before the gates open.

The Past Year

November 2025: back-to-back titles and a broadcast overhaul. The Dodgers beat the Blue Jays in 11 innings to win their second straight title, the first repeat in 25 years, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto took Series MVP (MLB.com). That same month, MLB also announced its 2026-2028 media rights deals with ESPN, NBCUniversal and Netflix, so there are simply more ways to watch games starring Japanese players.

The 2026 season: 24 bobbleheads. For the 2026 season, the Dodgers announced a schedule of 24 bobblehead giveaways in total, including commemorative models tied to the 2025 World Series (SI.com). The design converts the story of a championship into a reason to come to the ballpark all through the following season.

Notes From The Oshi Lab: When Do You Get the Cost of Giving Away Back?

What Japanese companies and clubs can learn from MLB’s giveaway culture is the design philosophy that “a free giveaway is not a discount but a sponsor’s advertising space.” Bobbleheads aren’t a cost borne by the club; they exist because companies bought the time their logos would be seen. As long as Japanese clubs weigh the cost of goods against one year’s merchandise revenue, giveaways on this scale will never work. What’s needed first is a sales playbook that sells giveaway items as a “sponsorship menu” rather than “promotion expense.”

At the same time, the value of what Japan already has comes into view. Individual player songs and cheering-squad culture, a vocabulary in which a word like oshi kyudan (your favorite team) circulates naturally, and the local roots that the J.League has built: these are mechanisms that create unity when everyone makes the same motions together, and MLB, built on individuals, can’t easily copy them. Rather than importing an overseas approach wholesale, we think it is stronger to borrow only the funding design for giveaways and keep the cheering etiquette Japanese.

The biggest lesson is what the numbers around Shohei Ohtani show: one oshi can dissolve the borders of a market. A picture of 20 Japanese companies sponsoring a Los Angeles club did not exist five years ago. Wherever the oshi is, fans’ wallets and corporate budgets follow. A fan-business design that assumes only the domestic market has clearly aged in the past few years.

To discuss oshi-katsu initiatives for sports organizations and clubs, contact KAZAORI Inc. (in Japanese).

Related Articles

Pro Baseball and Oshi-Katsu / J.League and Oshi-Katsu / What Is a Bobblehead? / What Is a Giveaway Promotion Day?