One Piece Night at Dodger Stadium happened again tonight, and Toei Animation and the Los Angeles Dodgers once again turned one of the most iconic ballparks in the country into something that felt genuinely surreal for anyone who grew up watching Luffy chase down the One Piece.
The sold out crowd at UNIQLO Field at Dodger Stadium walked into a stadium wrapped in digital One Piece imagery, animations running across every display surface inside the building, and both massive Dodger Vision screens in the outfield fully given over to the Grand Line for the evening. The first 52,000 fans through the turnstiles each received a co-branded Dodgers One Piece straw hat and a limited edition trading card from the One Piece Card Game featuring original art of Monkey D. Luffy in a Dodgers uniform, bat in hand, wound up and ready to send one over the wall.
Luffy himself kicked off the night by taking the pitcher’s mound and throwing the ceremonial first pitch, which is exactly the kind of sentence that would have sounded completely unhinged ten years ago and today feels like a perfectly reasonable thing for a major league baseball team to do.
Throughout the evening, fans participated in One Piece photo activations set up in the centerfield plaza, and during the fourth inning the fan favorite One Piece virtual noise meter made its return on the Dodger Vision screens with brand new animation produced specifically for this year’s event.
The night closed out with an eleven minute drone show that launched immediately after the final out, filling the sky above the ballpark with formations that had the crowd reacting the entire time. This is the second consecutive year Toei Animation and the Dodgers have pulled this off together, and the scale of tonight’s event makes clear that nobody involved is treating this like a novelty promotion with a short shelf life.
