TOKYO — The expectations for Shohei Ohtani’s first trip to Japan as a major league player were massive and unyielding. He is a near-mythic figure in his home country, and his presence there this week felt as much like a royal visit as it did a guy coming into town to play some baseball.

The sellout crowds at the Tokyo Dome — some of whom paid well into the thousands of dollars for tickets on the secondary markets — found even more reason to appreciate baseball’s version of a motion-sensor light: always ready to perform on demand.

Ohtani’s fifth-inning home run, a towering shot that seemed to disappear into the dome’s dirty-gray roof, managed to delight the crowd twice, once when it barely cleared the wall in right-center, and again minutes later when an umpires’ review confirmed its status as Ohtani’s first homer of 2025.

In the Dodgers’ two-game sweep of the Cubs in the Tokyo Series, capped by Wednesday night’s 6-3 win, Ohtani reached base five times, scored three runs and dominated conversation on and off the field. Eventually, baseball will turn its attention to the potential for a record-breaking Dodgers season — 162-0 is still in play — but for at least one more night, it was all Ohtani.

“It’s almost become the expectation that whenever he comes up in a big situation, he’s going to come through,” said Dodgers second baseman Tommy Edman, who hit the first homer of the 2025 season in the third inning. “We’re all out there grinding, trying to win a game, and he’s playing a different game altogether.”

The expectations were more muted for Dodgers rookie starter Roki Sasaki, who was faced with a heavy task: make his regular-season debut in Tokyo, at 23 years old and just months removed from playing Nippon Professional Baseball, in front of a hyped-up crowd that seemed to live and breathe through every pitch.

Before the game, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts downplayed both the importance and the expectation for Sasaki’s first start. His first four warmup pitches were uncatchable, with two going to the backstop. He looked visibly nervous on the mound, and he appeared ready to pitch at any moment, which caused him to be warned to wait for eye contact from the batter’s box on two of the first five hitters.

Sasaki’s talent is mesmerizing. His first four pitches hit 100 mph, and he topped out at 101. Regardless of the question, he has one answer: throw harder. He has a split that moves of its own free will, and it’s already being described as one of the best pitches in baseball.

Nobody can hit him, but as his first outing showed, maybe they don’t need to.

He allowed just one hit in his three innings, a weak infield single to Jon Berti, but walked five and threw more balls than strikes. He allowed two easy stolen bases when he walked in a run in the third, one of a stretch of three in a row, but then came back to strike out Michael Busch and Matt Shaw to finish his three-inning stint with just one run allowed.

“I think there were nerves, and understandably so,” Roberts said. “The velocity was good, but I thought the emotions, the adrenaline, was hard to rein in. … The highs are going to be high, and when he’s not commanding it, it gets a little bit tricky. I do want to say he wanted to stay in the game. That’s a decision I made in the best interest of him, but he wanted to keep going.”

Sasaki’s motion looks like an elaborate stretching routine. His leg kick, like his split, goes everywhere at once: out first, then up, then back, with his left heel kicking his hamstring before his whip-like body fires toward the plate.

The Tokyo crowd, filled with velocity aficionados, oohed and aahed every time Sasaki topped 98. After he walked in the run in the third, they began to clap as one, quickly and plaintively, rising to Sasaki’s defense that sounded like nervousness masquerading as hope.

Ohtani — always Ohtani — had two more at-bats after his home run. In the seventh, Cubs manager Craig Counsell caused the second-biggest crowd reaction of the night when he unsurprisingly walked Ohtani intentionally with Andy Pages on second and two outs in the seventh. It was easy to lose perspective amid the Ohtani fervor this week in Tokyo, and none of the 42,365 in the park seemed all that interested in experiencing Counsell strategizing to try to win a game.