MLB Seoul Series live updates: Shohei Ohtani helps lead Dodgers to 5-2 comeback win over Padres

SEOUL, South Korea — Tyler Glasnow’s homeostasis is delicate, a balance of extremes. He is 6-foot-8, yet built as if each of his limbs has been stretched out. He pushes off sentimentality, yet memorializes his love for rap music with hidden tattoos: one on his inner lip and another on the bottom of his right foot. His tantalizing stuff led the Dodgers to trade for him and give him a nine-figure extension this spring — but injuries throughout his career have meant he’s never topped 120 innings in a season.

The Dodgers are paying Glasnow to be an ace and named him their Opening Day starter for their series in Seoul, South Korea before he’s even thrown a pitch in their uniform. Glasnow is the potential superstar manager Dave Roberts called “cerebral” and who seeks precision.

For the pitcher, success means finding himself somewhere in the middle in a mind that embraces extremes. He will analyze his outings and rattle off his pitch’s horizontal and vertical movement with the informal nature he’d likely exhibit ordering a sandwich. That's a testament to a love for the numbers fostered during his breakout years with the Tampa Bay Rays.

Then there is Glasnow who has the same routine each day before heading to the ballpark, and each night before going to bed. He will sit, focusing on his breath, on a center in his mind, and find his home in meditation. It's a practice that began nine years ago while at Double A in the Pirates’ system. What started as a suggestion from his uncle, Wade, to address the stresses of being a minor leaguer became a ritualistic part of everything the now-30-year-old does.

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SEOUL — It was only an exhibition, a glorified scrimmage played on an elevated stage, but in some ways Monday marked the culmination of Ha-Seong Kim’s decade in professional baseball. Facing his first manager in the Korea Baseball Organization, playing in his former home stadium, the San Diego Padres shortstop hit two home runs and drove in four runs in a 5-4 win against the LG Twins.

“Can’t script it much better,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said.

“Some stuff,” second baseman Xander Bogaerts said, “is meant to line up.”

Over the past three seasons, Kim has emerged as perhaps San Diego’s most beloved player. Over the past few days in Seoul, Los Angeles Dodgers superstars Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto have drawn significantly more attention. A glance at the jersey-wearing fans that have flocked to Gocheok Sky Dome suggests that Kim’s close friend Jung Hoo Lee, even before his official debut for the San Francisco Giants, remains the most popular active major leaguer from South Korea.

Yet, as this country prepares to host its first MLB regular-season games, it is Kim who appears poised to serve as the emotional fulcrum of a historic series.

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The Padres announced their Opening Day roster, confirming that they had selected the contracts of rookies Jackson Merrill and Graham Pauley while revealing a notable exclusion. Reliever Woo-Suk Go, a standout closer in the Korea Baseball Organization over the past several seasons, was optioned to Triple-A El Paso after struggling this spring.

In other moves, the Padres selected the contract of utility man Tyler Wade, optioned catcher Brett Sullivan to El Paso and placed pitchers Glenn Otto (right teres major strain), Luis Patiño (right elbow inflammation) and infielder Tucupita Marcano (ongoing rehabilitation from knee surgery) on the injured list.

The inclusion of Merrill and Pauley on the roster signals an expected, organizational shift toward a greater reliance on youth. Merrill, who turns 21 next month, for weeks has been a virtual lock to open the season as the Padres’ starting center fielder, a position he had never played before this offseason. Officially, the shortstop prospect has 211 plate appearances above A-ball. Pauley has 88 plate appearances above A-ball. The 23-year-old should see time at third base, first base and designated hitter as third baseman Manny Machado continues to build up his arm after October elbow surgery.

Go, 25, signed a two-year, $4.5 million contract in January that required the Padres to pay a small posting fee to the LG Twins, the right-hander’s former team in the KBO. While team officials anticipated Go would need time to adjust, Go allowed six runs in 4 1/3 Cactus League innings. In an exhibition Monday at Gocheok Sky Dome, he surrendered a two-run homer to former LG Twins teammate Jae-won Lee.

Go’s contract stipulates that he cannot be assigned to the minor leagues without his consent during the 2025 season. He was aware he was on the roster bubble to start the 2024 season.

“I’ve got to make the Opening Day roster first,” Go, speaking through interpreter Leo Bae, said this month when asked about returning to play in his home country. “That’s my focus right now.”

The Dodgers' Seoul Series roster is as notable for who isn't on it as who is. Blake Treinen will open the season on the injured list with a bruised lung he sustained on a comebacker to the mound just days before the club departed for Seoul; while he was deemed healthy enough to fly, he didn't pitch in either of the Dodgers' exhibition games.

Michael Grove, who was in the mix for the fifth starter role that ultimately went to Gavin Stone, will open the season in the Dodgers' bullpen, along with pitching prospects Kyle Hurt and Landon Knack. While the latter two still project as starters long-term in the organization's eyes, they'll be available to provide length as needed after an abbreviated buildup. Hurt flashed in his big league debut as a reliever last September; Knack would be making his big league debut.

Treinen, Stone, Bobby Miller, Miguel Vargas and Hunter Feduccia are the travel squad members who made the trip to Seoul but won't be active for the games.

The roster announcement also included details on a pair of Dodgers who didn't make the trip. Brusdar Graterol complained of hip tightness that led to some discomfort in his shoulder, and will open the season on the injured list despite initial optimism he could be ready to go for domestic Opening Day. Emmet Sheehan will start the season on the injured list as expected.

SEOUL — Shohei Ohtani was always going to be a central figure this week, with his Los Angeles Dodgers debut set for Wednesday night against the San Diego Padres at Gocheok Skydome in Seoul, South Korea. Yet the more important development for the two-time MVP’s two-way future will come when the club returns this weekend to Los Angeles.

Ohtani, who will serve solely as a designated hitter in his first season after inking a record-setting 10-year, $700 million deal this winter, is set to start a throwing progression once the Dodgers return home, manager Dave Roberts confirmed Monday morning.

It’ll be Ohtani’s first time throwing a baseball since undergoing his second elbow ligament reconstruction surgery on Sept. 19. And while Roberts reaffirmed what he, Ohtani and Ohtani’s agent, Nez Balelo, have said throughout the spring — that Ohtani won’t pitch at all for the Dodgers in 2024 — it opens the door for the next stage of his fresh tenure with his new club.

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Agent Scott Boras on Tuesday morning railed against Harry Marino’s attempted ouster of Major League Baseball Players Association leadership, saying Marino and his supporters had undertaken a “coup” that should “never be done.”

Marino shot back that Boras’ support of executive director Tony Clark should be considered “alarming” and insinuated that Boras’ effectiveness was waning.

Some player leaders inside the union are aggressively pushing for Marino, who briefly worked at MLBPA, to replace Bruce Meyer, the union’s deputy director. If Marino and his supporters are successful, it looks increasingly likely that Meyer’s exit would also mean Clark would be out. Clark convened a video call that lasted nearly three hours on Monday night where player leaders fought over Meyer’s future and Marino’s viability.

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Every spring I write an article on breakout candidates but this year I took it a step further and created a 26-man roster of the players I think are most likely to have “breakout” seasons. My definition for a breakout candidate is simply a player I expect to perform at a significantly higher level than their major-league track record, or to burst onto the scene and blow away the rookie field. Breakout players share common traits including the ability to adjust and adapt, a high baseball IQ, and tremendous physical and mental skills. In addition, it’s usually a player 26 years old or younger.

Here is my stacked 26-man roster, a position-by-position look at the players who are primed for breakout seasons in 2024. There were at least a dozen more who could have made this team. Who’d I miss? Let me know in the comments.

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In honor of the Seoul Series at Gocheok Skydome this week, we thought it would be fitting to help introduce the Dodgers and Padres to one of South Korea’s most powerful diplomatic tools and global exports: K-pop.

After all, you can’t spell bats without BTS.

So what is K-pop, exactly? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a genre but an entire musical subculture — though the word is now often used as an umbrella term for most popular music coming out of Korea.

Though its influence in the West might be less visible to the average sports fan, K-pop is already entrenched in major leagues around the world. Its stars serve as global NBA ambassadors, official World Cup artists, and veteran MLB first-pitch throwers, and their fans and followers bring in millions of eyes and even more currency.

In other words, it’s an industry and sound tailor-made for sporting events.

With that in mind, let’s have some fun and assign a K-pop walk-up song to each projected player in the Seoul Series lineups, including at least one who will be right at home once the season kicks off.

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PHOENIX — Flags only fly forever if you raise them.

At Dodgertown, the ancestral home of the Los Angeles Dodgers in Vero Beach, Fla., a mural celebrating six World Series winners greeted visitors. No such signage exists at Camelback Ranch. The team has won the National League West 11 times since shifting its spring training base to Arizona in 2009, but the franchise does not memorialize mere postseason berths. The Dodgers intended to build a monument to the 2020 World Series championship team but pandemic-related construction delays sidelined the project, and the organization moved on. There are no murals and no banners, no portraits of protocol-following perseverance. If you rely upon commemorative decorations as your guide, the triumph in a 60-game season may as well not exist.

When Mark Walter, the owner of the Dodgers and the chief executive officer of Guggenheim Partners, met with two-way star Shohei Ohtani this past winter, he attempted to sell a vision based on these conflicting truths, the immense pride and deep frustration within his franchise. The Dodgers had become a colossus since Walter’s group took over in 2012 — a perennial contender, playing before crowds that lead the sport in attendance, driving a money machine now valued at nearly $5 billion. Yet the success could not offset the sting of October defeats. A series of early postseason exits since 2020 had disappointed Walter and those within his baseball operations department. As he outlined the dichotomy, Walter wanted to stress something to Ohtani: The owner considered his tenure running the Dodgers to be an on-field failure.

“We’ve only done it once,” said team president Stan Kasten, who was present when Walter spoke to Ohtani. “And we need to do it more often than that.”

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SEOUL — When Peter O’Malley arrived in this city in September 1993 to recruit a gifted but relatively obscure college pitcher named Chan Ho Park, the Los Angeles Dodgers president did not come as a complete stranger to a foreign land. O’Malley already had paid more than a few visits to South Korea and some of its neighboring countries.

He traveled to Asia and other parts of the world as he campaigned for baseball’s inclusion as a medal sport in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. He built youth and adult baseball fields in Tianjin, China. He got to know the family that ran the South Korean conglomerate Samsung Group, and he hosted the Korea Baseball Organization’s Samsung Lions for spring training at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla.

As an international pioneer and the owner of a storied franchise, O’Malley dreamt of the possibilities on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Now, with Major League Baseball putting on its first regular-season game in South Korea on Wednesday, he and Park are continuing to realize those dreams.

“It’s full circle,” O’Malley, 86, said earlier this month. “Chan Ho comes over (to the U.S.), does what he does, and now the Dodgers and the Padres are playing a real game, a meaningful game in South Korea. That’s major. That’s things that Hollywood movies are made out of. Just imagine being Chan Ho.”

Some three decades later, the power of inspiration will be on full display. The two-game series this week between the Dodgers and Padres will feature Japan’s Shohei Ohtani, arguably the most gifted baseball player ever; countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto, owner of the largest contract ever for a pitcher; and South Korea’s Ha-Seong Kim, the first Asian-born infielder to win a Gold Glove Award. Kim’s close friend, center fielder Jung Hoo Lee, recently signed a $113 million deal with the San Francisco Giants before he had played an inning on American soil.

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SEOUL — One day in the spring of 2020, shortly before the Korea Baseball Organization emerged as a focal point of a pandemic-impacted sports world, Seoul resident Daniel Kim received a direct message on Twitter. It was from Karl Ravech and Boog Sciambi, two ESPN broadcasters who introduced themselves — Kim, a KBO analyst and former South Korea scout for major-league teams, had met Sciambi but not Ravech — and explained they were looking for someone to assist with a novel undertaking. What they proposed sounded intriguing, ambitious and filled with unknowns. Still, Kim readily agreed to help.

“Plus,” Kim said recently, “I had nothing else to do. I was just like everybody else.”

About a week later, Kim found himself on American national television, having gone from watching Netflix on his couch to remotely joining ESPN’s broadcast of Opening Day in the KBO. For Kim, it was a couple of innings of baseball talk on an unexpected platform. For Ravech, calling play-by-play from his home in Avon, Conn., and ESPN analyst Eduardo Perez, providing color commentary from his garage in Miami, it was an enterprising first step in bringing a semblance of normalcy to live sports viewers around the globe.

Kim proved a hit with the Worldwide Leader. Over the next several months, as ESPN televised six KBO games per week, Kim logged close to 90 appearances alongside a rotating crew that included Ravech, Perez, Sciambi, Jessica Mendoza and Kyle Peterson. Amid their long-distance immersion into the culture and customs of Korean baseball, Kim’s new colleagues described him as both a frequent guest and a dependable tour guide.

“Whether he was the guy that we were talking to directly or he was the one steering us in the direction of other people, he was absolutely integral to all of it,” Ravech said. “He was, no question, the most familiar face, and in a lot of ways people are looking for credibility. He was the one who provided it.”

“Daniel was probably the all-around MVP of the KBO coverage,” said Phil Orlins, ESPN’s vice president of production.

Wednesday night in Seoul (6 a.m. Eastern Time Wednesday in the United States), the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres will open the 2024 season with the first of two games at Gocheok Sky Dome. Major League Baseball is finally playing its first regular-season contests in South Korea because growing the sport internationally has become a renewed focus in recent years; because Shohei Ohtani and Ha-Seong Kim have redefined the possibilities for Asian ballplayers; because Padres advisor and former Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho Park three decades ago became the first Korean-born player in the big leagues; and perhaps also because, just four years ago, a cross-Pacific bond sprouted out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Who knew when we started at ESPN that it would take us to Seoul, South Korea?” said Ravech, who will team with Perez, his Sunday Night Baseball partner, to call the Dodgers-Padres series on site. “I think part of that is the connection that we had to the KBO.”

That bridge was built on the strength of modern technology and with the considerable help of Kim, who will reunite with Ravech and Perez as ESPN’s sideline reporter for the series. For Ravech and Perez, the games at Gocheok Sky Dome will be a long-awaited opportunity to experience live, fan-attended baseball on Korean soil. For Kim, it will be the culmination of an unlikely journey that spans two continents and 13 time zones.

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No words were uttered in the Dodgers bullpen. It would have been futile to even try. Chan Ho Park, then a baby-faced 20-year-old, hardly spoke a lick of English. And bullpen coach Mark Cresse didn’t know any Korean.

Instead, the highly touted South Korean prospect was notified of what his team needed with a large cue card. Translators were not allowed on the field at that time. So Park’s only form of communication with coaches consisted of pre-written Korean phrases.

“Chan Ho, you’re up,” Park recalled Cresse’s message reading.

“How many more pitches do you need to get ready?” said another.

“I’m OK,” he was able to respond, leading to his entering the game shortly thereafter.

On that day, April 8, 1994, Kent Mercker threw a no-hitter for the Braves in Dodger Stadium. But that game’s lasting impact may have quietly come in the presence of the Los Angeles reliever who allowed two runs in one inning of mop-up duty.

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