While America slept, Major League Baseball’s regular season dawned in the Land of the Rising Sun, where the Los Angeles Dodgers swept a pair of games from the Chicago Cubs at the Tokyo Dome a full week before the other 28 teams get into action this coming Thursday.

Given that the rosters of both teams, especially the Dodgers, are studded with Japanese stars, the appeal to Japanese fans was natural. The oligarchs who run baseball also saw an opening in baseball-mad Japan as a path to fabulous new riches. “We do believe there are payoffs in the billions,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told The Athletic website.

OK, but bleary-eyed fans on the East Coast of the United States had to be up and about at 6 a.m. in order to observe their quintessentially American Opening Day rituals. In this matter at least, we are all in on America First.

Before leaving the Dodgers to the pursuit of another World Series championship, we feel bound to note that they are making a strong bid to assume the mantle of baseball’s Evil Empire, which the late, great Red Sox executive Larry Lucchino bestowed on the New York Yankees in 2002. Los Angeles has spent something like $1.5 billion in the past couple of off-seasons in the apparent attempt to corner the market on high-end talent, especially Japanese stars. The Yankees are still spending freely to be sure, but the Dodgers are now in a league of their own.

As for the Yankees, spring training brought the relaxation of the team’s longstanding ban on facial hair for its players, which depending on your point of view marked the sad end of a great, clean-cut tradition or a welcome relief from corporate conformism.

Spring training this year also brought an experiment with the Automated Ball-Strike system that has been used in the minor leagues in recent years. The so-called robot umps will not be employed in regular season MLB games this year, but who can doubt that the future belongs to them? From what little we saw, we didn’t hate it. Each team gets two challenges a game, which must be timely made by the batter, the pitcher or the catcher. The feedback is immediate, so no delay ensues, and the teams retain their challenges if successful. Interestingly, players and coaches familiar with the system from the minor leagues seem united in the belief that only catchers should question a ball or strike call, having a superior and more objective vantage point.

Baseball being a cultural as well as sporting event, an acclaimed new baseball movie titled “Eephus” is worth noting. The title comes from the eephus pitch, an unusual and rarely employed high-arcing floater that sometimes baffles the best hitters. The film includes appearances by two Boston Red Sox icons, announcer Joe Castiglione and retired pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a free spirit who was a devotee of the eephus delivery during his playing days.

There are many wonderful stories associated with the Spaceman’s days in Boston, but our favorite dates from the 1975 World Series between the Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, at a time when some players still socialized with fans after games. Told that Reds manager Sparky Anderson had said that Don Gullett, his star pitcher, “is going to the Hall of Fame after the World Series,” Lee supposedly replied, “And I’m going to the Eliot Lounge,” a legendary watering hole not far from Fenway Park. Gullett did not go to the Hall of Fame, at least not as an inductee. But we like to think that Lee put in an appearance at the Eliot.

Speaking of the Red Sox, the team overhauled its roster in the off-season and some experts give the Sox a decent chance to contend for a playoff spot for the first time in several mediocre seasons. We hope so, but were taken aback by a story that surfaced during spring training. A young Red Sox player asked Jim Rice, a Hall-of-Fame Sox slugger who now is listed as a “special assignment instructor” during spring training, for some hitting advice.

While Rice was imparting his take on the virtues of hitting line drives to all fields, a uniformed team staffer interrupted to admonish him that his approach did not align with the team’s current data-driven, fly-ball hitting instructional methods. Further reporting by The Boston Globe indicated that across baseball the advice of former players, even highly accomplished ones, is being shunned by the analytics experts who now rule the game, many of whom never played at a high level. A legion of people whose hard-won expertise in other fields is being pushed aside by the youthful Musk-rats of DOGE can no doubt sympathize.