80 Time April 25/May 2, 2022a guy able to do something that nobody’s seen.”
Off the field, there’s money to be made. Ohtani
now earns north of $20 million a year from en-
dorsements. He’s on the cover of the latest ver-
sion of the popular MLB The Show video game;
signed as a global ambassador for FTX, the
crypto currency exchange; and has deals with
brands like Hugo Boss, ASICS, Kowa, and Japan
Airlines. But he’s shown little interest in becom-
ing a ubiquitous commercial presence like Mi-
chael Jordan or Manning. He has no Twitter ac-
count. In the past two years, he’s posted just 20
times to Instagram (but has 1.3 million followers).
Ohtani wants his play to do the talking, a re-
freshing stance, but one that may not help base-
ball generate more buzz in America. Another chal-
lenge: English as a second language. After four
years in the U.S., his English is improving—“It’s
pretty damn good,” says Mizuhara—but Ohtani is
still much more comfortable speaking Japanese
in settings like interviews. Last summer, ESPN
commentator Stephen A. Smith sparked a con-
troversy when he said on live TV: “I don’t think
it helps that the No. 1 face is a dude that needs an
interpreter so you can understand what the hell
he’s saying.” Smith apologized for his comments,
and Ohtani tells TIME, “I don’t feel pressured [to
learn English]. I would prefer that I could speak
English. My job is to play baseball, and that’s the
reason why I came from Japan. It is important to
spend time on communicating or expressing my-
self, and I recognize that communication ability
could make a difference in my performance, and it
is important. But I definitely prioritize baseball.”
The game could use a superstar. On a list of ath-
letes whose name is recognized by Americans over
the age of 5, you have to run past 53 others before
you reach an active Major Leaguer: 30% of Ameri-
cans know Giants third baseman Evan Longoria, a
former All-Star years past his prime. “He may be
getting a halo effect from the actress Eva Longo-
ria,” says Henry Schafer, executive vice president
of the Q Scores Company, the firm that conducts
this market research. He’s not totally joking.
What’s the problem? Some of it’s built into the
game. In basketball, LeBron James can be involved
in every play he’s on the court for. But even a multi-
purpose outlier like Ohtani comes to the plate just
once every nine batters, and starts on the mound
once a week or so. The length of an average nine-
inning game is up 31% since 1975, largely because
managers change pitchers nearly twice as often.
Analytics have also encouraged a style of play
that has made baseball less interesting for many:
armed with more data, managers go to the bullpen
in search of advantage, just as fielders now shift out
of their typical positions to areas a specific batter is
known to hit. This incentivizes batters to swing for
the fences, rocketing the ball over these defensive
“shifts.” And as players launch their bats at higher
angles to loft homers, they strike out more often:
8.68 times per team per game in 2021, a 34.6% rise
since 2000. Homers and strikeouts are dramatic,
but their pursuit renders an already slow game
more predictable. One of the most exciting plays
in baseball, the triple, is near extinction: MLB saw
just .14 per team per game in 2021, the second low-
est total of all time. Stolen-base rates last season
were the lowest in 50 years. The game is losing all
manner of speed, a troubling development in a so-
ciety with shortening attention spans. “There’s no
question that analytics, while making teams more
shrewd in terms of selecting talent, has definitely
negatively impacted the attractiveness of the game
to fans,” says Patrick Rishe, a sports business pro-
fessor at Washington University in St. Louis.
It’s a paradox. Baseball is awash in money. MLB’s
new media-rights deals are worth some $2 billion
per year, a 26% increase from previous agreements.
Ohtani’s teammate Mike Trout, who statistically
ranks among the all-time greats, has a $426.5 mil-
lion contract but lacks the sort of mass following
that’s more common in other sports. And no one
even pretends the game remains at the center of
American life. “I have a class of 50 college-age stu-
dents, and when we were talking about the Major
League lockout a few weeks ago, it was hardly on
anyone’s radar,” says Rishe. “Whereas if we were
talking in the ’70s and ’80s to the same group
of kids, they probably would say, ‘Oh my gosh,
we’ve got to solve this. Where’s my baseball?’ ”