Shohei Ohtani Is Home and Focused on Baseball. Dodgers Fans Are Relieved.

The top deck of Dodger Stadium is far from the action but may have the best view in baseball. Straight ahead are the San Gabriel Mountains. During night games, as the sun goes down, the sky glows pink. Down below, the full choreography of the game is on display, offering a panoramic view shunned by the movie stars and moguls who fill the sections behind home plate.

And on Thursday morning, fans heading to those cheap seats passed a new addition to the ballpark: an eight-foot stone lantern given as a gift to the Dodgers in the 1960s by a famous Japanese sports columnist, Sotaro Suzuki. He helped draw the Dodgers to Japan for a good-will tour in 1956, two years before the team left Brooklyn for Los Angeles.

For Kimi Ego, a longtime Dodgers fan, the lantern has a special meaning, and she cried when she saw it: Her father was a close friend of Suzuki. For years, before her father died in 2000, he took care of the stone lantern, which was then tucked into a hillside beyond the outfield bleachers, and he trimmed the plants and shrubs surrounding it.

“Tears of joy,” said Ego, a retired schoolteacher who has been coming to Dodgers games since the 1960s. “My father worked so hard maintaining the garden.”

The monument pays homage to the team’s past and present.

In December, the Dodgers signed the world’s biggest baseball star, the two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, to the richest contract in sports history: $700 million over 10 years. For good measure, the team signed another Japanese superstar, the pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for $325 million over a dozen years — the most lucrative contract ever for a pitcher.