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

Among players aged 20 or younger, Jackson Merrill is just the third in the last 50 years to start in center field on Opening Day. The other two are Andruw Jones and Ken Griffey Jr., who happens to be at Gocheok Sky Dome tonight.

If Merrill was nervous before his major-league debut, he wasn’t showing it. Merrill, who met Griffey at the 2023 Futures Game, spent a few minutes during batting practice chatting with another former center fielder, native San Diegan and former Baltimore Oriole Adam Jones.

“It was pretty cool,” Merrill said. “I grew up near Baltimore, and he played in Baltimore most of his career, so it was kind of cool to finally meet him, pick his brain a little bit.”

K-Pop band aespa is entertaining the crowd.

The lights have just been dimmed…

The Padres have not finished a full season closer than 18 games back in their division since 2014. That trend could easily continue after a winter in which San Diego underwent the league’s largest payroll reduction while the Dodgers landed Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow. The Diamondbacks and Giants also made significant additions.

But last week's trade for Dylan Cease was a reminder that A.J. Preller, even operating with budget constraints, remains perhaps the most aggressive general manager in the sport. Juan Soto, Blake Snell and Josh Hader are gone, but a rotation fronted by Cease, Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove and Michael King is a good place to start for a would-be contender.

Read our preview of the National League West below ahead of today’s game starting shortly.

It's hard to ever say winning a division is a given, but after claiming 10 of the last 11 NL West titles, it's far from uncharted territory for this group. You don't commit more than a billion dollars in free agency just to try to win the division. No, these Dodgers spent with eyes on washing away the sting of consecutive first-round exits that spoiled 100-win seasons.

Inking the richest contract in pro sports history (Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million deal) or the richest ever for a pitcher (Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s 12-year, $325 million signing) would represent a splash. Even Tyler Glasnow’s nine-figure extension would, too. But rather than settling for a splash, they’ve affixed the spotlight firmly on themselves.

Winning a World Series is difficult to guarantee on paper, but there might be no club that exemplifies "World Series or bust" quite like this.

Read our preview of the National League West below ahead of today’s game starting shortly.

A wrinkle in tonight's matchup: today will be the first time Shohei Ohtani has ever faced Yu Darvish, a fellow legend of NPB's Nippon Ham Fighters and his teammate last year with Samurai Japan during the World Baseball Classic.

“Darvish is somebody I always looked up to when I was a young kid. I really respect him as a pitcher, tried to form my game around him,” Ohtani said this week through his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara.

“I had a chance to play with him in the WBC, had a chance to work out with him in past offseasons. He's a good friend of mine and I haven't faced him up to this point, so I'm really excited to be able to face him finally.”

Earlier on in South Korea today police said they had found no explosives at Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome after a reported bomb threat was made ahead of Major League Baseball opening game between the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres.

“It's unfortunate that the threat of a bomb is even a possibility, but I have complete confidence in Major League Baseball and the security here that we feel safe,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said before the game.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts added he had been told to “just keep working on the baseball game.”

Needless to say, today’s game will be proceeding as planned.

As if there’s any doubt about the biggest star in Seoul this week — a fan cross-stitched a depiction of Shohei Ohtani, his wife Mamiko and dog, Dekopin.

SEOUL, South Korea — Upon emerging from the 14-hour haze of their flight to Korea, the Los Angeles Dodgers stepped into a sea of flashbulbs at Incheon International Airport. The fans here camped out by the hundreds and did so for hours, rising to a stir for each of the baseball galácticos. They chanted Freddie Freeman’s name as if he were digging into the batter’s box at Dodger Stadium.

If the hordes of cameras and camped-out reporters in the parking lot this spring training were the appetizer, the Dodgers on Friday afternoon got their entree. The greeting was a slice of what they might expect during their season-long traveling tour.

A Korean fanbase roared for the franchise that debuted Chan Ho Park, the first Korean-born big leaguer, 30 years ago. And in a way, the Dodgers roared back, spending more than a billion dollars this winter on Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

For weeks, manager Dave Roberts has likened the media crush awaiting the Dodgers in Korea to the arrival of the Beatles.

Now the “Deatles” — or the “Sho-nas Brothers” — have their first tour stop at the Gocheok Skydome in Seoul, whether they’re ready or not.

“I think we're kinda starting to get used to it a little bit, but I don't know if anybody can get used to things like this,” Freeman said at a press conference on Saturday when he joined his fellow MVP teammates Ohtani and Mookie Betts at the podium. As Freeman spoke, each word felt cut off by the endless chorus of shutters clicking on cameras.

Read the full story here.

It’s an age-old question that’s been bandied about on barstools, berms and BarcaLoungers forever. Who has the best starting rotation this year? In locales closer to San Diego, the wrinkle is just more personal: Now that Dylan Cease has joined Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove and Michael King, how do the San Diego Padres compare to other starting pitching squads in the sport?

Numbers get a bad rap sometimes, but without them, this job is much harder. You’d have to play a giant game of “Would you rather …?” while slotting each Padres player against his comparative starter on another team. As division rivals and one of the best teams in the league, the Los Angeles Dodgers are an easy choice for the first comparison.

Maybe you’d rather have the younger duo of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow at the top, but already you start asking questions. How many innings of Glasnow? Are we giving Darvish and Musgrove any credit for bouncing back off tough, injury-filled seasons? And then you start trying to compare Cease and King to Bobby Miller (with the short track record) and … who are you taking as the fourth? Veteran James Paxton? Or how many innings of Walker Buehler? And does it matter how you order these two? Who has better depth? Does that matter to this conversation? And what will Clayton Kershaw be to the Dodgers this year?

It’s a whirlwind, and we only tried it with one other team. Gotta repeat this another 28 times to get it right. Settle in if this is your method.

Bring in the numbers and it gets a little easier and quicker to settle, but you still have questions. Do we use last year’s numbers or do we use projections, which try to account for the fact that players bounce back all the time and sort of wobble around a true level of talent from season to season?

FanGraphs has taken projections and then assigned innings for starting pitchers, all the way down to the 12th starter (or beyond). It tries to account for injury risk in that process, as well as talent. There’s an element of the human touch here, but it’s based on projections, and FanGraphs has done the work systematically for all 30 teams. Here are the top 10 teams by its Wins Above Replacement projections, using FanGraphs’ depth charts for playing time distribution:

Read the full analysis here.

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.

Read the full story here.

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.

Read the full story here.

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 — Milton High School, located north of Atlanta, has produced four major leaguers. The first, Kyle Farnsworth, pitched for nine teams across 16 seasons. The second, Dexter Fowler, went to an All-Star Game and won a World Series in the same year. The third, Bobby Scales, surfaced with the Chicago Cubs after 11 seasons in the minors and later applied his experiences as farm director for the Los Angeles Angels.

The fourth, Dylan Cease, went from the Chicago White Sox to the San Diego Padres on Wednesday, then from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Incheon International Airport less than two days later.

“I’ve got to imagine that’s pretty historic — you show up for the first time, you get traded and you meet your club in Seoul,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said.

Sunday in Seoul, Cease essentially shrugged when asked about his grueling itinerary. The runner-up for the 2022 American League Cy Young Award will not pitch in the Padres’ season-opening two-game series against the Los Angeles Dodgers here. Cease and the club could have had him stay in Arizona to face minor-league hitters — Dodgers pitcher James Paxton is doing just that — before making a short trip to San Diego. Instead, he made a transpacific flight on his own.

“I think there’s a lot of benefits,” Cease said. “On top of that, it’s a very cool experience. Yeah, it’s just good to get acclimated with the team and the staff and kind of just see how everyone goes about their business and kind of what things are going to look like and what’s expected.”

Read the full story here.