• by Danielle Oster , March 30, 2025

Baseball season is here, and Major League Baseball is celebrating in an unusual format.

The MLB launched a campaign for the 2025 season celebrating the “Heroes of the Game,” highlighting some of the league’s biggest stars, such as Shohei Ohtani, Paul Skenes, Juan Soto and Aaron Judge. What’s most attention-grabbing about the effort, however, is the animated format and anime style, courtesy of Japanese anime director and Studio Ghibli alum Hiroshi Shimizu.

“Heroes of the Game” transforms baseball stars into anime athletes with seeming superpowers. Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), the league’s creative agency partner for the campaign, worked with Passion Pictures and Echelle Studios on the launch campaign videos, running in 15-second, 30-second, and 75-second iterations. Anime creators -- including those with credits on iconic releases like "Fullmetal Alchemist" -- “hand-drew every scene in the hero films,” according to the league.

“Heroes of the Game” launched this week across MLB media platforms and digital OOH placements. The campaign’s OOH component includes video digital OOH installations running i in Shibuya (Tokyo), Flannels Flagship Store in London, Mexico City’s Museo Soumaya, and New York’s Times Square. On March 27, the league celebrated Opening Day with a celebration outside MLB Headquarters in New York incorporating campaign imagery, with a “life-size installation of nine player baseball cards including Ohtani, Judge, Soto, Skenes, Ronald Acuña Jr., Jose Altuve, Bryce Harper, Julio Rodríguez and Mike Trout to commemorate 2025 MLB Opening Day.”

“Heroes of the Game” marks an extension of the “Baseball Is Something Else” campaign launched last year, also created in partnership with W+K, for the new baseball season. The campaign also follows the Tokyo Series games played between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in Japan last week.

In addition to anime’s overall rise in popularity among U.S. audiences in recent years, some of the league’s most popular players have expressed a fondness for the genre, according to the MLB, with “stars like Jazz Chisholm Jr., Rodríguez and Ohtani all publicly expressing their enjoyment.”

Videos currently in development will tell the stories of additional MLB players, combining live-action footage with anime imagery. That approach will be deployed “throughout the season on MLB social channels to react to events on the field” as part of the campaign, according to the MLB.