81
“You know what,” says Billy Grisham, of San
Pedro, Calif. “At our local Little League, the
numbers have been down. Kind of a bummer,
because when we were kids everyone was on a
Little League team.” He was at the Angels’ Cac-
tus League park with his wife and their 7-year-
old son, who wore No. 17. Ohtani jerseys account
for half of sales at the team store, including the
model that has his name in kanji, the script of his
native Japan—where base-
ball is still wildly popular,
as it is in other East Asian
nations. Ohtani is a big rea-
son why: in Taiwan, ratings
for Angels games were 84%
higher than those for non-
Angels games. In South
Korea, MLB’s Ohtani-re-
lated social media posts
drew 179% greater engagement than other posts.
If there appears to be no limit to the NBA’s
global appeal, and the NFL dominates the Amer-
ican sports world, baseball is betwixt and be-
tween: extraordinarily popular in a handful of
nations in the Caribbean and East Asia—in partic-
ular Japan—but no longer dominant in the coun-
try that in the ’70s and ’80s pumped out movies
about a sport (Bull Durham, The Natural, Field of
Dreams) thought to be quintessentially American.
And now Ohtani has arrived as if from central
casting, his every move in some games tracked
by a dedicated camera from the Japanese tele-
vision channel NHK. A typical day found four
U.S. and 25 Japanese sports journalists at Angels
spring training, not counting the camera crews
perched on a hill overlooking the camp. The man
can’t walk on the street in Tokyo. “If he has to go
to dinner, I make reservations and find the back
ways,” says Mizuhara.
But in the country where he recorded the most
phenomenal season in big league history? “We can go to Whole Foods
and stuff,” Mizuhara reports. Ohtani’s certainly admired. Q Scores says
33% of Americans who know of him have a “very favorable” impres-
sion, No. 1 among all athletes measured by the firm; Michael Jordan’s
score is 32%, Simone Biles’ 30%. But just 13% of Americans polled even
know who he is.No oNe watches ohtaNi more closely than Ohtani. At spring train-
ing, Mizuhara stood by with a camera phone, recording every swing for
review. “If you notice today, he took, I think, three rounds of batting
practice,” says Angels catcher Max Stassi. “I don’t know exactly what
he was working on, but he was working on something. And then he got
what he wanted and he gets out.”
“He has that lightness to him because he puts the work in,” Stassi
says. “That really frees him up on the field, because he knows that his
preparation is second to none. Nobody’s ever done both at such an elite
level, so there’s not, like, a template going into it.”
Ohtani calls himself a “pioneer” for future pitcher-sluggers, as if
there really will be more like him. When he says, “I don’t have anybody
to compare myself to,” it’s not vanity speaking but a request for more
data: “I can have a better understanding on how good my numbers are
if there are more people and a bigger sample size.”
At another point he says: “If it was a choice between strikeout or
home run, I would choose home run, because the probability of a
home run is lower.” In a game reduced by data science to a binary—so
many at bats are a strikeout or a homer—it’s possible to see Ohtani as
analytics personified. But he knows analytics aren’t everything. Like
his manager, Ohtani is a graduate of the liberal
arts school of baseball, a slugger who savors not
just attention- getting home runs and strikeouts
but the joys of “small ball” (he stole second and
third in one game). The slowness of the game is a
quality “that we should cherish,” Ohtani says. “I
feel like one of the strongest points about base-
ball is its long history. It has classical aspects
that no other modern sports have.”
And now it has him.
He means it about continuity. Ohtani says he wants to reach the play-
offs this year, and win a World Series. “I need to evolve,” he says. “While
others are getting better every year, I cannot stay the same.” Baseball
really needs Ohtani showcased in October, during the postseason, when
more eyes are attuned to the sport. Los Angeles finished under .500 again
last season; the franchise hasn’t made the playoffs since 2014. Ohtani
winning multiple games on the mound—and at the plate—in a World Se-
ries would go down as among the greatest baseball stories ever written.
Don’t discount it from happening. Baseball may indeed get its swag-
ger back. Because Ohtani is making a promise.
His best?
“It’s yet to come.” —With reporting by Shiho Fukada/Tokyo and
Nik PoPli/WaShiNgToN □