Jan 26, 2024
Tickets for Ohtani’s Seoul Dodgers Debut Sell Out in First Hour
, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- Tickets to watch Shohei Ohtani make his debut for the Los Angeles Dodgers in a season-opening baseball game in Seoul were snapped up in the first hour of going on sale Friday.
About 30,000 people were on the waiting list for the Major League Baseball game, the first of two in the Seoul Series, as of 8:05 p.m, and that number rose to 40,000 in the following 15 minutes. Coupang Play, which is selling the tickets and streaming the games, said it was not immediately able to confirm how many people accessed the ticketing platform.
Competition for seats for the March 20 and 21 Seoul Series was expected to be intense because the initial game marks Ohtani’s first game for the Dodgers after he signed a record $700 million, 10-year contract last month. Other big-name Asian players in the series include the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and San Diego’s Ha-seong Kim and Yu Darvish.
Tickets for the March 21 game will open for sale on March 1.
The series will be the first time a MLB regular season game is played in South Korea. Fans using Coupang Play’s app and website trying to buy tickets face tall odds, as capacity at the Gocheok Sky Dome where the games will be held is about a third of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
First-floor table seats are the most expensive, costing 700,000 won ($524) each, while the cheapest tickets are outfield standing-only spaces at 120,000 won each, according to Coupang Play, a unit of South Korean e-commerce firm Coupang.
Read More: Tickets for Ohtani’s Dodgers Seoul Debut to Start Around $90
JTB Corp., Japan’s largest travel agency, said earlier Friday that it will offer exclusive travel packages, including tickets, to the Seoul Series in partnership with MLB.
JTB will disclose further details on packages this month, it said in a statement. There has been concern that fans outside of Korea could find it almost impossible to get tickets for the games from Coupang Play because sales on its platforms require a Korean phone number and government-issued identification card.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
