Dodgers' Japanese superstars are the result of decades of work

Design by Tom Forget

"I know that I could go everywhere I wanted to in Japan and never see another scout," Ted Heid, the longtime Mariners Pacific Rim scout who helped the team land Ichiro Suzuki, told MLB.com recently.

"It was easy to see somebody who was not Japanese in the crowd behind home plate with a radar gun," said Scott Akasaki, formerly an assistant in the Dodgers' Asian Operations department in the late '90s and early 2000s and now the team's senior director of team travel.

That scenario, where scouts were few and far between in Japan and across Asia, seems impossible to imagine now. The Dodgers trio of Japanese superstars of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki have helped lead the team back to the World Series, while the Cubs relied upon Shota Imanaga and Seiy