Shohei Ohtani is reviving the national pastime
By Sean Gregory and Karl Vick/Tempe, Ariz.
SPORTS
When Shohei ohtani takeS a Seat on a Shaded bench to
await his turn in the batting cage at Los Angeles Angels spring train-
ing, the feeling is like a restaurant when a movie star is escorted to a
table. Everyone pretends not to notice, but the mood in the room is
suddenly giddy.
An All-Star pitcher who hits 46 home runs will do that.
Ohtani is a baseball savant doing what has never been seen in Major
League Baseball history. The last player to both pitch and hit at an elite
level was Babe Ruth, a century ago. But the Bambino stopped pitch-
ing relatively early in his career to concentrate on hitting. And no one
ever called Ruth fast. Ohtani, the unanimous American League MVP,
stole 26 bases last year.
And look at the guy. Baseball’s savior has the body of a Marvel super-
hero and plays with the joy of a child. In practice, when Ohtani laughs
muffing a grounder, what carries across the infield could be the giggle
of a cartoon mouse.
The start of any new baseball season brings hope, and baseball has
never needed it more. Opening Day this year, April 7, came as the for-
mer national pastime struggles with its declining cachet in America.
The game has grown too slow—the average affair runs as long as Gandhi,
more than three hours—and a bit stale, with a preponderance of home
runs and strikeouts robbing its incremental drama. This offseason was
dominated by a frustrating 99-day lockout that threatened to deprive
fans of two great attractions: Major League ballparks freed from pan-
demic capacity restrictions at the start of the season, and a Japanese-born
phenom building off a 2021 season that galvanized everyone but him.
“To be honest, I’m not impressed with what I
did personally,” Ohtani, 27, tells TIME. His ear-
nest eyes betray no false humility. “I think it was
nice to have a good season, but what’s more im-
portant is continuity,” he says. “In that sense, this
year is very important.”
Ohtani’s extraordinary talent may contain the
power to redeem not just baseball but also other
data-driven sports that have superseded it in the
American imagination. He single- handedly up-
ended the received wisdom that excellence can
fow only through slavish devotion to a single
discipline : pick a sport, then a position, ideally be-
fore turning 8, and stick with it. A player who can
throw a 100-m.p.h. pitch in one inning, and in the
next hit a homer that leaves his bat at 110 m.p.h.
challenges the tyranny of “analytics ”—shorthand
for the increasingly obscure metrics (DRS, WAR,
FIP, etc.) that drive trades, salaries, attention, ne-
gotiations, wagering, and, some would aver, a lot
of the joy from sports.
“With numbers,” says Angels manager Joe Mad-
don, “it’s almost becoming a socialistic version of
sports, baseball especially. We all want the same
thing, with the same player to be built the same
way, doing the same things. We keep subtracting
the human element. The whole world’s into spe-
cialization, and that’s why it’s becoming a little
bit more boring. Our cars are all the same color!”
Maddon, who hails from “the liberal arts school
of baseball—I want it all,” presided over the 2016
championship run of the long-benighted Chicago
Cubs, who drew attention “like the Beatles.” Yet
more people in the U.S. seem to obsess over foot-
ball and basketball. “The thing that bothers me as