Major League Baseball recently announced the 2025 regular season schedule featuring an opening series between the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers from the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Japan. The two-game opening series will mark the 25th anniversary of the first regular-season MLB games being held in Japan and represent the sixth time the MLB season has opened in the city. Both teams have several Japanese-born players, including Seiya Suzuki and Shota Imanaga of the Cubs and Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Dodgers. Morning co-hosts Mike Mulligan and David Haugh of 670 The Score believe that the show should make the trip to cover the MLB World Tour games and create an event with other activities and broadcasts.
Mulligan had expressed that he wanted to go to Tokyo and see the sites, emphasizing that he also wants to be packed into a Subway car as well. Haugh replied by stating that they should go as a show, a proposition with which Mulligan concurred and suggested that they could bring people with them and make it a trip.
“Yeah, I think that’s a good idea,” Haugh said on Friday’s edition of Mully & Haugh on 670 The Score. “They were lobbying openly, shamelessly, on the afternoon show [Thursday] to try to go – Score House Tokyo. I don’t think that we’re going to be that overt about it.”
Mulligan conveyed that the timing is wrong for them and that they would be able to broadcast their show following the conclusion of the matchups. The trip would encompass them going to the city to analyze the opener while also leading people on cultural events. In fact, Mulligan suggested that Haugh could lead the group through the city since he has visited the locale for a short time. While Haugh does not speak Japanese, he stated that he would be willing to learn the language if they go to Japan and announce the trip with enough time.
“Right now – I don’t know what these guys on the afternoon show are proposing,” Mulligan said. “They want to go there and have some sake. They’re in it for the sake. We are going to go there – we’ll take a giant group of people with us. We’ll lead the trip, [and] we will have Mr. David lead you around Tokyo. He’ll teach you the crucial expressions in Japanese.”
Haugh articulated that he has sipped tea with Sadaharu Oh, widely considered one of the greatest Japanese-baseball players of all time. In 22 seasons with the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, he hit .301 with 868 home runs and 2,170 RBIs on 2,786 hits, the third-most hits in the history of Nippon Professional Baseball. Haugh, however, is not the biggest fan of Japanese food and said that he would not want to be in the city for that long.
“We’d go for five days because we got to get acclimated and we got to do the show,” Mulligan said, “…and we got to get back [for the Final Four], but we got to get there.”
The two games take place on March 18 and March 19, one of the earlier starts to an MLB season in recent memory. Since the games fall close to St. Patrick’s Day, Mulligan explained that he would find an Irish pub to commemorate the holiday with others in the group.
“We’re going,” Mulligan said. “We’re going to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, and then we’re going to watch the Cubs and we’re going to do our broadcast and we’re going to bring a bunch of people, and everyone’s going to be happy and we get to go.”
“And we can talk about our experience in covering the Bears in London in the fall, right?,” Haugh said, citing the Week 6 game between the Chicago Bears and Jacksonville Jaguars from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday, Oct. 13. “International travel right here on The Score.”
“There you go – we’ll do that too,” Mulligan exclaimed. “We’ll do it all – we’ll do it all! We’ll do it live!”
