While the majority of Major League Baseball awaits Opening Day on March 28, the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers will begin their regular season in a matter of hours. On March 20 and 21, the Southern California rivals will face off in Seoul, South Korea, for what MLB is calling the “Korea Series”.
The two games, hosted in Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome, will both begin at 5 a.m. CT. Padres infielder Ha-Seong Kim, a South Korea native, is quite familiar with the venue. The Sky Dome is home to the Kiwoom Heroes, a Korean baseball team that featured Kim from 2014-20.
The Korea Series will also feature three superstars from nearby Japan. The Padres five-time all-star pitcher Yu Darvish will get the start for San Diego on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Dodgers will send recent signee Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound Thursday for his first major league start. Finally, who could forget Shohei Ohtani, whom the Dodgers made the richest man in the history of professional sports with a $700 million contract that was inked in January. Wednesday will be Ohtani’s first regular season game wearing a Dodger uniform.
After the two-game series concludes, both teams will actually return to the states for a few spring training exhibitions before the league-wide start to the regular season on March 28.
This wonky way to begin a season in comparable to the 2019 campaign, when MLB had the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics face off for a pair of regular season games in Tokyo, Japan on March 20 and 21 of that year. Both of those games had over 45 thousand fans on-hand, in what was the final professional appearances for Japanese and MLB legend Ichiro Suzuki.
If you can not wait another week for regular season baseball, early wake-up calls Wednesday and Thursday will be in order to watch the Korea Series.
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