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Jeweled Without a Ring: The Curious Case of Shohei Ohtani Ian Jason Dizon (Aomori)
T
he game of baseball has had many faces. You could argue that several of these athletes or all of them deserve to bear this ambassadorial role. Babe Ruth was a star pitcher who stunned the league by evolving into one of the greatest hitters the game has ever seen. As a fan of the Dodgers as much as the game, I’d be remiss to neglect Jackie Robinson, who not only broke down the barriers of color and became the first black baseball player in the Major Leagues, but also won the first Rookie of the Year Award, an accolade now named in his honor. Of course amongst the legends is Willie Mays, a 20-time All Star and two-time MVP who won the defensive Gold Glove Award 12 years in a row and was considered then to be “the greatest all-around player the game has ever seen.” (1) The days of Mays, Ruth, and Robinson are gone now, and while the tradition of baseball is eternal, the game is everchanging. In modern times,
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however, there is almost unanimous agreement: the face of baseball today is Shohei Ohtani. On paper, his statistics tell an all-star story, and he’s assembled a trophy case of accolades that most players would only dream of having. But it is not in his accolades or his statistics where we find the heart of what Shohei Ohtani represents for the game of baseball and the legacy he hopes to leave on the sport; those are just the pieces of the player, after all. Bringing those aspects of his career into perspective only gives us a small look at the climb of a young athlete into athletic stardom, as well as the pressures of the spotlight and the pursuit of a championship. Like most rising stars in baseball, the story of Ohtani and the sport began long before his professional career, when, as an 18-yearold high school student, he roared onto the radar of
MLB scouts by tossing a 100 mph (160 km/h) fastball (a speed most MLB pitchers struggle or fail to surpass) in the qualifying rounds of the Summer Koshien, Japan’s national high school level baseball tournament. Unlike most rising stars from Japan, however, Ohtani would not only stun the MLB but the NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) as well, by declaring that he would skip signing with any Japanese team entirely and opt to be drafted straight into the MLB system out of high school, the first Japanese player to do so. (2) Initially scouted as a potential pitcher for MLB, he would eventually be convinced to postpone his dream of playing in America when the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters offered Ohtani something no other MLB team would: the chance to “set the baseball world on its ear like no player had before” and develop him as both a pitcher and a hitter in a “two-way experiment.” (3) The pressure was on. If they could succeed, Ohtani would
