Perfect Game to Host Inaugural Pacific Baseball Championship

Perfect Game’s international expansion will reach a new level this year with the inaugural Perfect Game Pacific Baseball Championship, an international 15U tournament set to take place from August 8–11 in Hokkaido, Japan, an event years in the making.

The tournament will feature teams representing the United States, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, China, Taiwan, South Korea and one additional team to be announced at a later date.

This year may be the inaugural event but its idea was something discussed internally within Perfect Game even before the pandemic, with the original plan for it to be located in Hawaii. Restarting the conversations led instead to Japan as the preferred site.

“Japan is a lot closer to the Asian countries, it has a lot more facilities than Hawaii,” said Dustin Shindo, who is Perfect Game’s liaison to the Pacific Rim. When rebooting the idea with 2025 15U Pacific Baseball Championship Director Jon Tarumoto, “we realized at that point that Hawaii, as great a destination as it is, is really difficult for some of the Asian countries to get to and the airport in Hokkaido is a direct flight for most of these countries.”

The Chitose Civic Baseball Stadium will host the pool matchups while the Sapporo Dome, home of the Nipponham Fighters and former home ballpark for MLB superstar Shohei Ohtani, will host the semifinals and championship game. The semifinals and championship game will be broadcast on PerfectGame.TV and the PGTV app.

While planning the event and getting support from some of the Japanese government’s entities, “we started looking for a location that would be special for the kids, a home for an event of this stature,” Shindo said. “(Sapporo Dome) became that unique place that we could get. It was a combination of organic conversations and then a Eureka moment of ‘oh my god, this would be an amazing treat for these kids.’”

PG revealed its first member of the U.S. team today as outfielder Joel Vargas, No. 10 in Perfect Game’s national rankings, will participate. The rest of the U.S. roster is being finished up in the next few weeks with a full roster reveal show scheduled in late June.

“Joel is a fantastic player, he’s the kind of teammate and person that you want to have on a team representing your country,” Shindo said. “We’re looking at players that have the baseball skills but also the character and personality that you want representing your country. Joel represents that, which is why we wanted to share his selection first.”

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All of the teams will be getting into Japan on August 6 before a day of non-baseball activities, including an opening dinner where everybody can mingle and share cross-cultural experiences. All the teams will be in one hotel as well with buses transporting them around Hokkaido.

“The model that we’re after, and credit to Little League, is to have something like (the Little League World Series) but at an older age,” Shindo said.

The Pacific Baseball Championship is the latest in PG’s plans for international expansion and taking its platform of baseball and softball events abroad.

“Having events like this, it really will expand the brand, it will help reach a lot of kids that otherwise we wouldn’t reach,” Shindo said. “Whether it’s giving them opportunities for U.S. colleges, I know we can do a lot of great things. Beyond that, it’s improving youth baseball overall. I think MLB is doing this as well simultaneously … it’s an indication of what’s going on overseas and we want to expand that same interest to youth baseball.”