Even with Shohei Ohtani in the house, Pikachu still knows how to electrify a crowd.

The Major League Baseball season got off to an early start on Tuesday night with the opening of the MLB Tokyo Series 2025, in which the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers will be taking on the Chicago Cubs at Tokyo Dome. The Dodgers being in Japan also means the return of Shohei Ohtani, the biggest star in all of professional sports, to his native country, and taking the mound as the Dodgers’ starting pitcher for the game was another high-profile Japanese player, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who the Dodgers signed from Japanese professional baseball’s Orix Buffaloes last season.

So it was going to take someone with a lot of star power of their own to capture the crowd’s attention with those home-grown heroes in the house, but if there’s anyone who knows how to electrify the atmosphere, it’s this guy.

Yes, none other than Pikachu was on hand, or actually a pair of the Electric-types, one sporting a Dodgers jersey and the other dressed in Cubs gear!

Prior to the player introductions, a special video saluting “MLB monsters [who] came to Japan” over the years and “Japanese monsters [who] went to MLB” was played on the stadium’s video scoreboard, complete with Pokémon anime-style special effects for their highlight reels. And when the time came for each player to be announced, they took the field to the sounds of the Pokémon main theme and other selections from the franchise’s soundtrack, as can be heard at the point cued in the video below.

The production brings to mind memories of the Tokyo Summer Olympics opening ceremony in 2021, when athletes from around the world entered the stadium to a selection of iconic video game musical pieces from series such as Final Fantasy and Ace Combat, showing that game music has been legitimized as a proud part of Japan’s modern musical culture.

Though the Dodgers fell behind early, they later rallied to win the game by a score of 4-1. With statistical analysis now showing a 100-percent winning rate for the club when Pikachu is part of their pre-game procedure, I think we can agree that metrics are clear and that the Dodgers management should move to immediately sign Pikachu to the club and have him appear before every Dodgers home game in Los Angeles as they prepare for a back-to-back championship attempt.

Source: YouTube/MLB, Twitter/@MLBONFOX
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