It begins at once. In the very first inning of his very first start last season, Shohei Ohtani does the thing that now distinguishes him among, frankly, all baseball players ever. In the top half of the inning, Ohtani-the-pitcher eases his way into 2021 with a few 100-plus mph fastballs and three quick outs. Then, in the bottom half, Ohtani-the-hitter launches the first pitch he sees 451 feet into the right field bleachers, becoming the first starting pitcher to homer in an American League game since 1972. In just half an hour, then, the full breadth of the spectacle of Major League Baseball’s first pitching-and-hitting two-way phenom since Babe Ruth.
The Los Angeles Angels superstar grows more dominant on the mound all summer, supported in part by the offense that he himself generates. As a result, he becomes the first player in baseball history to appear in the All-Star game as both a starting pitcher and a lead-off hitter. In his home country of Japan, where he was born, raised, and revered before he jumped to the MLB four years ago, the public broadcasting network, NHK, televises all of his games, employing in some broadcasts a special Ohtani cam that holds on him at all times, allowing viewers to track his every home run, head scratch, and cup adjustment. A 7 p.m. East Coast road game starts at 9 a.m. in Japan. A 7 p.m. L.A. home game starts at noon. Daily Shohei from halfway around the world, so ubiquitous it’s like the weather. What we are witnessing during the Summer of Shohei is Ohtani becoming one of the rarest things in sports: an athlete who is capable, in any given crack of the bat or duck-diving splitter, of producing something no one has seen with their own eyes before. It feels so natural to watch the biggest and most talented kid on the field doing everything well that it only underscores how rare it is for a pitcher-slugger to ascend to the highest level of baseball. How improbable it is to excel at one baseball thing—let alone the two most highly valued skills in the game: surgical power pitching and fearsome power hitting. Shohei is, in this way, like LeBron bringing the ball up the court, shooting threes, dunking over defenders, and swatting layups off the glass at the other end of the court. He is, in this way, like Lionel Messi weaving box to box with the ball at his feet, beating six or eight defenders, and practically dribbling across the opponent’s goal line. That is, defying the prescribed limits of conventional positions, spacing, and skill so overwhelmingly that it makes us question whether the game’s ideas about who should play where and in what capacity are wrong—have always been wrong. Vest, $198, and shirt, $99, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Mock turtleneck, $35, by Lands’ End. Pants from ABC Signature Costume. Jacket, price upon request, by ERL. Turtleneck, $178, by Boss. Hat, his own. When the Summer of Shohei ends in the fall, Ohtani is presented with a unanimous MVP award (rare) and the Commissioner’s Historic Achievement Award (rarer still). He is one of the few things in America, then, that people can seem to agree on. But more than that, he is the surest sign in a generation that the game may have a player and a whole new way of playing to bring baseball back from the brink.
10 Things Shohei Ohtani Can’t Live Without Shohei Ohtani is in the cushioned cockpit of a Duffy boat that’s cruising the man-made waterways off Newport Beach, California. He is in all black black Asics sneakers; black Hugo Boss sweatpants and sweatshirt; black Oakley sunglasses; and a black Hugo Boss hat, worn backward. Black that matches his matte black all-electric Tesla Model X. Black that lengthens his broad and plenty long six-foot-four frame, a frame so perfectly, hybrid-ly engineered for pitching for power, hitting for power, and running for speed that Hall of Famer Chipper Jones called it “one of the best baseball bodies I’ve ever seen…. He’s Adonis.” He is 27 years old and has a young lineless face, made younger by an indiscriminate grin and a high-pitched laugh. On the field, he makes clear that barreling a baseball 500 feet or watching a batter whiff at one of his splitters is, in fact, more than any other emotion, fun. He often can’t help but smile when he does something incredible. And occasionally apologizes to opponents, with genuine sheepish deference, when he does something so extraordinary that it surprises even himself. There are compilation videos of his countless baseball feats, but also of Shohei just picking up trash off the field and in the dugout, evidence to the fans who make the videos that he’s “just a great human.” Shohei talks with English speakers primarily through his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, who is also his 24/7 right hand, and, on the boat today, at his left hand. There’s a pattern to our exchanges. I say something, Shohei understands some, Ippei translates the rest. Shohei draws in a sharp inhalation as he considers questions with the full battery of his brain then says something that makes Ippei chuckle. It’s a warm game of telephone. He hasn’t done something like this before, and it maybe feels novel to put one’s lived life into (translated) words. I get the sense that he follows most of what I’m saying all afternoon, while my entirely untrained ears understand almost none of what he does, save the occasional yakyu (baseball) and Ichiro-san. Sweater, $1,290, and shirt, $690, by Prada. Pants, from ABC Signature Costume. Shohei was from his earliest age what’s known in Japan as a yakyu shonen a kid who eats, sleeps, and breathes baseball. He grew up in Oshu, Iwate Prefecture, a region of rolling mountains and farmland. “Way out there,” Shohei says. “Countryside. Middle of nowhere.” The equivalent in Japan of growing up in the cornfields of the American Midwest. His dad played ball in the Japanese Industrial League for the automotive plant where he and Shohei’s mother worked and coached Shohei’s little league team. At the youth level, games in Japan begin with players removing their caps and bowing to their coach, their hosts, the fans, and then the field. (A tradition that adds context to those videos of Shohei clearing his cathedral of litter.) Shohei attended one of the top baseball high schools in the country and experienced his first real national attention as an 18-year-old when he was clocked on TV throwing a 100 mph fastball to another teenager who looks in the instant like he’s just seen the future: his, not playing baseball; this kid on the mound, making it somewhere very far.
After flirting with jumping to America while still in his teens, Shohei signed with the Japanese pro league’s Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters when they agreed to let him try playing both ways (something no team in Japan or the U.S. had been scouting him for at the time). During his five years with the Fighters, Shohei became the Nippon Professional Baseball league’s star. An MVP. A Japan Series champion. A future world beater. The Fighters are based in Sapporo, the capital of Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido, where it is snowy, windswept, “harsh,” Shohei says—in all times but the heart of baseball season a landscape shaped by arctic blasts across the Sea of Japan from Siberia. While living in the team dorms, he sent his salary home to his mother, who in turn put about a thousand dollars in his personal bank account each month that Shohei rarely touched. Despite the mounting fame in Japan, his was a life organized around the single-minded pursuit of a set of highly specific baseball goals. In high school, his coach asked him to create a document with objectives for each year.
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