Dave Roberts and Japanese American Dodgers Staff to Speak at JANM on July 29

LOS ANGELES, CA – The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) will present Beyond the Dugout: A Discussion with Japanese American Staff at the Los Angeles Dodgers on Saturday, July 29, 2023 from 11a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Tateuchi Democracy Forum. Tickets for this special event are $25 ($20 for JANM Members). Tickets are available at janm.org/events/calendar.

This dynamic conversation will feature World Series Champion and Team Manager, Dave Roberts; Play-by-Play Broadcaster, Stephen Nelson; Senior Director of Team Travel, Scott Akasaki; Director of Integrative Baseball Performance, Emilee Fragapane; Senior Director of Design, Ross Yoshida; and Manager of Performance Operations, Will Ireton. All of them hold prominent positions for the historic and pioneering professional baseball franchise. Together, they will explore what it means to be a Japanese American in a non-traditional career field and discuss how their background influences and shapes their work.

Roberts is the first manager of color in Dodger franchise history and begins the season with the highest winning percentage by a manager in Major League Baseball history. In 2020, he joined Cito Gaston as the only Black managers to win a World Series. Nelson joined the Dodger broadcast for the first time in 2023 and is the only Asian American play-by-play announcer working for a Major League Baseball team. Akasaki is the first Asian American in all of professional sports to run travel and logistics, and is the club’s fifth team travel representative since the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958. Fragapane joined the Dodgers as a Baseball Operations intern directly out of college and now helps integrate analytics and baseball between the front office and the coaches and players, with a focus on the rising availability of biomechanical data. Since 2009, Yoshida has led an in-house design and creative services team that creates the Dodgers’ annual visual campaign and marketing slogan. Ireton initially joined the Dodgers as Kenta Maeda’s interpreter and now manages the team’s daily processes during the season and oversees projects that require cross-departmental collaboration during the offseason.

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About the Japanese American National Museum (JANM)

Established in 1985, JANM promotes understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience. Located in the historic Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles, JANM is a hybrid institution that straddles traditional museum categories and strives to provide a voice for Japanese Americans as well as a forum that enables all people to explore their own heritage and culture. Since opening to the public in 1992, JANM has presented over 70 exhibitions onsite while traveling 17 exhibits to venues such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Ellis Island Museum in the United States, and to several leading cultural museums in Japan and South America. JANM is open on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday–Sunday from 11 a.m.–5 p.m. and on Thursday from 12 p.m.–8 p.m. JANM is free every third Thursday of the month. On all other Thursdays, JANM is free from 5 p.m.–8 p.m. For more information, visit janm.org or follow us on social media @jamuseum.