Sports Illustrated - USA (2020 - Spring)

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

20

seasons; Ohtani happily remained

there when the obligation ended.)

Since his MLB team does not have

a dorm, Ohtani lives three minutes

from Angel Stadium.

“It almost feels like a dorm because

it’s so close,” he says.

He hesitates to identify how he

spends his time other than his two

passions: baseball and sleeping. (He

gets nine hours of sleep, nods off on

airplanes easily and cherishes naps,

had to check to see if it was corked.”

But then the spring games began,

and major league pitchers continually

beat Ohtani with velocity. He didn’t

have a single extra-base hit during

the exhibition schedule in Arizona.

Ohtani had hit his whole life with a

big leg kick, and Trout knew what

was happening: “His timing was off.

I was telling the hitting coaches, ‘He’s

got to get his foot down. If he doesn’t,

he’s going to be hitting nothing but

Indeed, Ohtani’s pitching in 2018

was truncated by a blown right elbow

ligament that required Tommy John

surgery. His hitting in ’19 “suffered”

(he still slugged .505) due to a congeni-

tal left patellar condition that required

season-ending surgery in September.

Therein lies the magic and the pre-

ciousness of Ohtani. Here he sits with

a rebuilt elbow, a mended knee and a

repaired right ankle: three operations

in 24 months. Yet he persists in doing

what no major leaguer has done for

a hundred years—not because it’s a

stunt but because he must.

“Of course, I like doing both,” he

says. “That’s one of the biggest reasons

I want to keep doing it: I have the ca-

pabilities to do it. When I’m actually

out there hitting every day and pitch-

ing and running around, that’s when I

feel the most satisfaction in baseball.”

When Ohtani plays baseball, the

field is his grown-up playpen. It trans-

forms, as if by mounds of dirt, a toy

and a joystick, into a labor of love.

OHTANI IS THE

Nashi pear of ballplayers, the

Pyrus pyrifolia of the diamond. The

fruit is a delicacy reserved for guests or

family gatherings, often given as a gift,

so precious that each is encased in pad-

ding to prevent bruising. Nashi pear

fields cover many of the hills around

Kamagaya, a bedroom community of

110,000 that serves Chiba and Tokyo.

Among these fields and commuters,

about a mile down narrow roads from

the nearest train station on Pear Street,

is the minor league dormitory where

Ohtani lives and trains in the offsea-

son, just as he has since 2012, when

he signed out of high school with the

Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. The

Fighters assigned him to Room 404,

the room vacated by pitcher Yu Darvish

after he signed with the Rangers.

During regular seasons with the

Fighters, Ohtani lived in an 18-room

team dormitory in Sapporo, main-

taining the similar tight schedule of

train-work-eat. (Players must bunk

at the dorms for their first four

20 FOR THE ’20S

SHOHEI OHTANI