Maybe there just shouldn't ever be any other baseball games happening while Shohei Ohtani is in action. Sure, a fan can glimpse the bottom line and think something like Wow, another dong for Shohei. But in the case of what happened during the Dodgers' 9-6 win over the Red Sox on ESPN Sunday night, the dispassionate "Ohtani: HR (30)" simply is not sufficient.
A bunch of different L.A. players pummeled Boston pitching in this game, but nobody's blast stood out like Ohtani's, which almost escaped the ballpark entirely as it whizzed 473 feet to a spot beyond the right-center bleachers. Facing Kutter Crawford, who'd just surrendered a shot to Austin Barnes to begin the bottom of the fifth, Ohtani let a couple of balls pass by him before swinging hard at and missing a high cutter (with a C) for a 2-1 count. Then, with the broadcast focused exclusively on him after wrapping an interview with a young fan who'd just missed catching an earlier home run ball, Ohtani delivered what everyone who watches the Dodgers wants to see, and then some. Receiving an 86-mph offering right in the heart of the zone, Ohtani unleashed a gorgeous uppercut and banished the ball out of view behind some of the cheapest seats in the stadium.
This being Ohtani, his display of strength only made people wonder what more he could do. After the game, he was asked about hitting a ball entirely out of Dodger Stadium at some point during his career.
“That’s what I hope,” he said through an interpreter. “I think I’m going to have a lot more opportunities to do so. So definitely looking forward to one of those.”
Ohtani's performance was chased on Monday morning with this piece in The Athletic from Ken Rosenthal, which outlined the ways in which Ohtani's former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara and his agent Nez Balelo formed "a protective cocoon" around an introverted player who almost never showed an interest in anything but his job responsibilities. It portrays Ohtani's life as kind of a lonely one, in which he's isolated even from his fellow players by his devotion to being the best:
With the Angels, Ohtani never even participated in common clubhouse rituals such as NCAA tournament and Master’s pools. The notion that Ohtani would even be interested in international soccer, one of the sports Mizuhara bet on, is outlandish, some team sources said. One guessed Ohtani could not even identify Patrick Mahomes, the NFL’s biggest star. “All he cared about was playing his video game on his phone,” an Angels person said. “And then it was baseball.”
The Athletic
Rosenthal goes on to say that in the Dodgers clubhouse, with Mizuhara gone and with Ohtani's baseball-related English improving, he's more embedded in the team culture than he was in Anaheim. But for the fans, there remains a tremendous amount of mystery when it comes to Ohtani off the field. He's not a Podcast Guy, thank goodness, and his endorsements are bland and forgettable, which is nice. But he's also so private about his personal life that he became a husband completely out of nowhere, and it was genuine news when the public learned the name of his dog. As a celebrity, Ohtani is a blank slate. His work on the field, however, is as transparent as it gets.
Smashing a dinger nearly 500 feet in front of 50,000 people in a stadium, plus a national (and international) television audience, is an act that commands attention. It's also a story that doesn't require any interpretation or analysis, like a restrained interview answer or a cute expression-turned-meme in the dugout or a massive betting scandal. Everyone watching Ohtani processes the same moment, the same flight of the same ball. Spectacular home runs speak in large bold letters. For a man otherwise devoted to his privacy, his swings are an instance where he appears in the spotlight without any kind of guardrails. Almost every aspect of Ohtani's life—his moods, his anxieties, his joys—stays unknowable. If he sometimes acts as if he were put on Earth to do nothing other than smash baseballs, when he really gets a hold of one, it's easy to believe him.
