Credit: Joe Glorioso/All-Pro Reels, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
A Trans-Pacific Moment
For the majority in Southeast Asia, baseball seems a distant spectacle, a sport watched from afar, if at all. Yet, on the night the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays met in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series in Toronto, baseball briefly became a sport impossible to ignore.
What caught everyone’s attention was not just the event but also Ohtani Shohei, the Dodger’s Japanese two-way star player, whose presence alone could turn a regular game into a global broadcast.
Fans in Japan shifted their Sunday around games and sports commentators brimming with national pride. Even if one did not understand the rules of baseball, there is a sense of a moment of high drama, the kind of “winner-takes-all” occasion that we in Southeast Asia may associate with a World Cup Final. It was a euphoric moment for enthusiastic baseball fans and casual followers alike.
Ultimately, in the game, the Dodgers secured a 5-4 victory, delivering them back-to-back World Series titles, the first baseball franchise to do so in a quarter of a century since the famed 1998-2000 New York Yankees.
Throughout the series, Ohtani’s presence proved consequential in ways beyond any single play. Ohtani is not simply a star athlete; he is an anomaly that breaks the modern logic of the sport.
Baseball, since the early 20th century, has operated on the assumption that no individual can dominate both as a pitcher and a hitter. The physical demands and divergent skill sets prove to be a Herculean requisite for any baseball player.
Ohtani has dismantled this entirely, and he does so dominantly.
To illustrate, in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, equivalent to a semi-final before entering the World Series, Ohtani produced a performance that commentators instantly declared the greatest in playoff history: six scoreless innings and three home runs at the plate.
This should not have been possible—it is comparable to a footballer scoring a hat trick while also keeping a clean sheet. The totality of his talent and performance at this level is simply inconceivable.
When an athlete redefines the constraints of
The resulting “Ohtani economy” produced an estimated US$770 million in value across viewership, sponsorship, merchandise and social engagement. Additionally, the Dodgers secured approximately US$75 million in Japanese sponsorships after his arrival, alongside a 32% increase in Asian viewership of Major League Baseball (MLB). Even before Ohtani was called a Dodger, the Canadians, whose Blue Jays launched an ambitious recruitment campaign to get Ohtani, found themselves in a cultural triangle connecting Tokyo, Toronto and Los Angeles.
It is here that a sporting story transforms into a global discourse. Scholars of international relations describe figures like Ohtani as non-state diplomatic actors, capable of shaping public sentiment, transmitting cultural meaning and fostering shared experiences.
These are elements that ASEAN can consider to enhance regional soft power beyond formal diplomacy. As Malaysia’s ASEAN Chairmanship 2025 draws to a close, the attempts to position cultural diplomacy as a strategic instrument becomes an ever-present appeal.
The question derived is also clear: what lessons can a region of 11 nations draw from the way a single athlete helped turn a North American sporting event into a genuinely trans-Pacific cultural moment?
ASEAN’s Cultural Diplomacy in a Visibility-Driven World
If Ohtani and his growing prestige show us anything, it is that cultural influence moves through people, in that we follow stories, personalities and industries that grow around them. This shift in the diffusion of culture carries important implications for ASEAN, where the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) has been placed at its forefront during Malaysia’s 2025 chairmanship.
At the 34th ASCC Council Meeting, ASEAN Member States (AMS) reaffirmed Malaysia’s priorities in the cultural sphere, which include “Cultural Heritage for Value Creation” as well as “Youth and Sports Potential for All to Foster Growth, Unity and Excellence”.
Recent initiatives, from the China-ASEAN Gen-Z Youth Festival 2024 to the ASEAN Film Festival 2025, show how cultural spaces continue to soften tensions and deepe
To Malaysia’s credit, Kuala Lumpur is doubling down on ASEAN’s belief that unity arises from consistent social engagement, rather than a grand spectacle. In this sense, ASEAN’s cultural diplomacy is fundamentally different from the high-performance, revenue-driven models of sports leagues such as MLB. Its value lies in sustaining relationships and stability rather than monetising attention and visibility.
Nonetheless, the strength of ASEAN’s inward-facing cultural model also reveals its limits. It was built to prioritise stability and consensus, both of which frequently necessitate slow, patient relationship-building rather than the quick pursuit of visibility.
However, it now sits uncomfortably within a global cultural environment where attention, speed and repetition increasingly determine whose stories are seen and whose identities travel.
Sports, in particular, have taken off as a major player in the realm of soft power. Research in this field
The link between visibility and influence has also been noted: “The use of sport in shaping the international image of a state can also take the form of showcasing sport-related assets during the non-sporting event.”
In this visibility-oriented global landscape, ASEAN’s cultural diplomacy, grounded in patient internal engagement, often competes against far stronger engines of global attention.
This is where Ohtani becomes illustrative. It is not simply his individual brilliance that drives his global reach, but also, importantly, the commercial ecosystem that surrounds him. The machinery of broadcasting, merchandising and sporting infrastructure that propelled him to international fame is boosted by digital storytelling that operates at a speed ASEAN was never designed to match.
Each time he delivers, the world seems to know at once: a home run in Los Angeles can light up screens in Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City and Cuba within seconds. In fact, Ohtani’s return to pitching with the Dodgers was the most-watched regular-season game in MLB.TV history.
ASEAN, by contrast, works on a different clock. Its cultural diplomacy prioritises slow, incremental, steady trust-building over the fast-paced exposure that drives global cultural markets. Ohtani operates within a platform designed for an international limelight, while ASEAN’s mechanisms are structured to maintain unity within the region.
There is no question about Southeast Asia’s cultural depth. ASEAN is not lacking in genuine stories, art forms or identities. What is missing is the machinery that carries these stories outwards: production networks, commercial partnerships and platforms that enable narratives to travel beyond borders.
This is the gap where the Ohtani playbook helps illuminate: it demonstrates how cultural influence now travels through networks of production and amplification that do not exist at the regional level.
What ASEAN Can Learn
The way forward lies in empowering individuals who have the capability to carry stories across borders. Cultural diplomacy works because people become symbolic ambassadors, and the visibility generated by celebrated individuals can project a cultural message before any official programmes do.
ASEAN has this prerequisite. The shortcoming lies in the deliberate strategy to identify, support and position talents as the embodiment of Southeast Asia, rather than simply as representatives of their home countries.
The success of the Ohtani phenomenon relies on a two-way flow of talent, capital and attention. Japan sends its cultural figures to North America, and the latter reciprocates through viewership, sponsorships and cultural engagement. ASEAN frequently excels at showcasing culture but rarely at constructing these exchanges.
Sports diplomacy research repeatedly emphasises the value of this logic. Envoy programmes, bilateral training systems and mobility schemes contribute to the deepening of ties. There is plenty of room to adapt these ideas beyond just sports; think about things like joint film production grants or co-funded creative fellowships. The principle is simple: what the region shares with the world must also have a way of coming back, carrying new audiences, new networks and new momentum into Southeast Asia.
Subsequently, if recognition must circulate, then ASEAN must also reckon with the machinery that makes this possible. The commercial ecosystem that made Japanese stars in MLB possible – broadcast clips, merchandise cycles, endorsement economies and digital storytelling – is the very definition of the soft power of markets.
If ASEAN hopes to elevate its cultural profile abroad, it must rethink its cultural assets as marketable. It is through these platforms that audiences accumulate, narratives repeat and identities gain traction, ultimately turning regional heritage into a competitive advantage.
Conclusion
Ohtani’s global influence is not a lesson for ASEAN to replicate, but it indeed reveals the conditions under which cultural influence travels today. ASEAN certainly does not lack culture, talent or diversity. It merely lacks the pathways that allow these to move with momentum.
Its traditional, consensus-driven approach still matters for internal cohesion; hence, the true challenge lies in combining the two models. It remains to be seen whether ASEAN can preserve its cultural authenticity while also building an ecosystem to project its image globally. Perhaps, if baseball can travel far, ASEAN’s stories can too.
