The regular season of the North American baseball championship is drawing to a close. The thirty Major League teams have played most of the 162 games they had available to qualify for the playoffs and possibly try to win the World Series, the expected final of the championship that has filled the autumn season of American sport for decades.
In such a long regular season, in which from April to September you play almost every day, even twice within 24 hours, to be one of the best twelve teams in the league and qualify for the playoffs you need consistency and concreteness. Competitive teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Houston Astros and the two from New York, the Mets and Yankees, have proven to have both, and in fact have a guaranteed spot. Others already know they no longer have a chance, like the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the old Disney team.
Yet in the Angels of Anaheim there is a phenomenal player: the Japanese Shohei Ohtani, voted best player in the league last season and in the running to be the same in this one. Ohtani is considered the perfect player to revive the slightly out-of-fashion image of baseball, but with the Angels he has never played the playoffs and after the last of many seasonal defeats he is sure not to play them this year either.
Ohtani, 28, grew up in a mountainous, agricultural area of Japan and made a name for himself as a professional baseball player with the Hokkaido Island team. Five years ago, when he was still playing there, he made clear his intentions to go and play in North America, in the best baseball league in the world, to continue doing what he had become famous for in his country: hitting and throwing at the same time. , with very high returns, comparable to those that had been able to reach only Babe Ruth, legendary player of the New York Yankees and of the baseball of yesteryear.
Like Babe Ruth, nicknamed “the child” also for his famous round and sly face, Ohtani has a clean and tidy face of a good boy, which perhaps helps him to “hide” an imposing body of 1 meter and 93 centimeters by almost a hundred. kilos. And a good boy seems to be: he is polite in his manner, smiling, elegant without excess and attentive to what he says and what he does, like when you see him picking up litter from the fields where he has just finished playing.
Ohtani arrived in the United States in 2018 and was named Newcomer of the Year in the first season. After that season he had some physical problems and then the pandemic arrived which momentarily halted his rise. However, since the championship has resumed regularly and the physical problems have passed, Ohtani is competing in championships defined as historic, so much so that last year the New York Times he titled: “Shohei Ohtani is simply the star of which the American pastime he needed”. In a long profile dedicated to him, Daniel Riley he wrote are GQ: «Ohtani is one of the few issues on which everyone in America seems to agree. Above all, however, his advent is the surest sign, for a generation now, of the fact that baseball can count on a player who could save this sport from the abyss ».
Shohei Ohtani signs autographs at Seattle stadium (Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
Last season Ohtani hit 46 home runs, only two fewer than two other specialized hitters, and at the same time he kept a very high pitching average, the seventh of the whole championship in the index that summarizes the incisiveness of the performances on the mountain. launch. All in one era, the so-called it was analytical of baseball, where training, focus, and throwing and batting techniques have become highly specialized and considered, at least until now, accessible to a few.
His records are constantly increasing. He was the first player in history to be selected for the All-Star Game as both the starting pitcher and the first batter; he was the first starting pitcher to hit a home run in the championship since 1972; he became the first ever to have both made and received the first pitch of the season in the same match; he is the first Japanese to have exceeded thirty home runs in more than a season; he set a momentary record of power impressed by a left-handed, “shooting” a ball out of bounds at 190 kilometers per hour; and it could be continued, in a sport where statistics historically abound.
Ohtani was such a great novelty and became so dominant on the pitch that between last season and the current one the league introduced a rule specifically for him – the Shohei Ohtani rule – to allow a team to use a starting pitcher also as a designated hitter, thus allowing him to bat even after his turn as a pitcher, things that up until then was not allowed.
Just as the rules have changed, so have video games. The Show is the reference video game of baseball, the most accurate and sold in the world. This year Ohtani is the player on the cover, but also the player who led the developer company to change the structure of the game. “Until recently this game did not conceive the players equally skilled in the two disciplines” has explained one of the leaders: «Either you launched, or you beat. When Ohtani arrived, many lines of code were rewritten. And it took us two years to do it ».
This year Ohtani has managed to improve even more. He hasn’t reached the heights of last season, but his averages have risen uniformly in every relevant aspect of the game, making him even more dominant: if he’s not in the top five in the main throwing and batting indices, he’s just out of the five. .
Despite all this, once again Ohtani’s season with the Angels ended in September and he will not continue in the playoffs, or in the most watched and spectacular games of the league. And the same goes for his teammate, Mike Trout, who in 2019 signed the richest contract in the history of North American sport. Together they are considered to be the most complete players around, yet they both ended up in a poorly managed and under-followed team.
In July, when it was already clear that even this year the Angels would not have made it to qualify for the playoffs, the New York Times he wrote: “Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, aspiring saviors of baseball, need to be rescued. Their Los Angeles Angels are headed for another terrible milestone, another postseason failure “.
As has happened since playing in the United States, Ohtani will spend the next few months in Japan – where they follow him all year, whatever time of day he plays – and then return to California for the new season. His situation, however, shouldn’t stay the same for long. The owner of the Angels, Arte Moreno, the first Mexican-born investor to buy a Major League team, would be willing to sell them to the highest bidder. And in any case, at the end of next season Ohtani will have a chance to break free from his current contract.
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