Shohei Ohtani has another win to add to his stockpile.
After winning the World Series and his third league MVP award, the Los Angeles Dodgers star now has the world’s most popular Major League Baseball jersey.
The league says the rankings are based on sales of Nike jerseys from the Fanatics network of sites, including MLBShop.com, since the culmination of the World Series.
Ohtani leads six Dodgers in the top 20. Others are Freddie Freeman at No. 2, Mookie Betts at No. 4, Yoshinobu Yamamoto at No. 10, Clayton Kershaw at No. 11 and Kike Hernandez at No. 16. With Ohtani’s jersey at No. 1 and Yamamoto’s at No. 10, it is just the second time two Japanese-born players have ranked in the top 10. Ichiro Suzuki and Yu Darvish did it in 2012.
Now, imagine how many more Ohtani jerseys will sell once he’s able to take the mound again. That might still be a ways away after a pause in his throwing program, but don’t worry, it wasn’t for an injury: the Dodgers wanted to let the two-way player focus on his offense with the regular season just getting going. Ohtani hasn’t taken the mound since undergoing Tommy John surgery back in 2023, before he signed with the Dodgers as a free agent.
This delay hasn’t stopped Ohtani’s popularity even a little bit, and between his presence on the team and the Dodgers’ overall success, it has meant sale after sale of his and his teammates’ jerseys. Don’t fret, fans of small-market teams: jersey sales are part of what feeds into the pooled together central fund that’s dispersed among the teams as part of the revenue-sharing agreement, so here, at least, success by the Dodgers is also success for your club.
Non-Dodgers in the top five are Juan Soto of the New York Mets at No. 3 and reigning American League MVP Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees at No. 5. They are followed in order by Francisco Lindor of the New York Mets, Bryce Harper of the Philadelphia Phillies, Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros, Ronald Acuña Jr. of the Atlanta Braves and Yamamoto.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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