It’s the final week of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ regular season. The San Diego Padres are in town and a win tonight at Dodger Stadium over their Interstate 5 rivals would secure their 11th NL West division title in 12 years. There’s an excited buzz in the halls, even now, hours before the gates open to the public. The clubhouse is palpably tense: at the end of a season plagued by injuries, the opportunity to earn a first-round bye and bypass the wild-card round could prove invaluable to their ultimate goal of a World Series title. A tall, floppy-haired man enters the room, noticeably more tranquil than anyone around him, armed with a soft smile and a steaming cup of tea, and plops down at his locker. He is almost staggeringly unbothered. One would never guess that he’s a history-making global phenomenon, primed to embark on his first ever trip to the postseason since joining Major League Baseball six years ago with the crosstown Angels. But Shohei Ohtani is not your average superstar.
At this point the 30-year-old’s dumbfounding statistical achievements speak for themselves, hard as they are to comprehend. Even in a season when his unprecedented two-way skillset was forced to take a backseat with his rehab from a second major elbow surgery keeping him off the pitcher’s mound, Ohtani found a whole new way to rewrite baseball’s record books. Only days ago he became the first player in major league history to rack up 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single campaign. By week’s end, he will have finished the regular season having topped the National League in homers (54) and runs batted in (130) with a batting average (.310) second only to San Diego’s Luis Arráez (.314), falling a few percentage points short of becoming the NL’s first Triple Crown winner since Joe Medwick of the St Louis Cardinals in 1937. The eye-watering numbers don’t stop there: 134 runs scored, 411 total bases, a .646 slugging percentage and an OPS over 1.000.
Ohtani’s first season of a record-shattering $700m, 10-year contract with the Dodgers has, somehow, been worth every penny as he led the team to the best record in the majors despite a slew of injuries. But to hear those closest to him tell it, it’s Ohtani’s demeanor outside the lines and in the clubhouse that further sets him apart.
“The way he carries himself, I mean, he knows there’s a lot of attention on him and you wouldn’t even know it,” says third base coach Dino Ebel, who worked with Ohtani in his first year with the Angels before they reunited with the Dodgers this spring. His face lights up immediately when I ask what Ohtani is like, and he echoes sentiments I hear over and over in asking people throughout the team about him. The word “humble” comes up in every conversation. He just wants to be one of the guys is another common refrain. “He’s Shohei Ohtani,” Ebel says with a smile and a shrug. “He’s just a genuine, great person.”
Even as he’s broken records with stunning regularity, Ohtani, who speaks only Japanese during tightly controlled media availabilites, has cultivated a celebrity that transcends baseball. He’s very handsome, but in a boyish, wholesome way. His immaculately groomed, impeccably trained Dutch Kooikerhondje named Decoy threw out the first pitch before an August game. Los Angeles City Council has already passed a resolution declaring every 17 May Shohei Ohtani Day for the duration of his Dodger career. He’s a perfect modern superstar: almost as if he was custom-made in a lab to sell baseball jerseys. Say nothing of the slew of Japanese sponsors his presence has drawn to the Dodgers, who have experienced sharp increases in attendance for both road games and ballpark tours hosted by Japanese-speaking guides.
Maybe for these reasons, many who believed Ohtani’s squeaky clean public image was too good to be true seemed almost relieved when a would-be “gotcha” moment arrived during spring training, when he found himself at the center of a theft and gambling scandal involving his close friend and longtime interpreter. But the truth, even there, was disappointingly innocuous for those who had been awaiting a soap-opera imbroglio. According to an extensive federal investigation, Ohtani was found to have been the victim of a betrayal (described as “deep and extensive” by US attorney Martin Estrada) by one of his most trusted confidants, who was charged with stealing $16m from the star to pay illegal gambling debts.
Such an unsettling experience might have derailed other players, certainly those playing under the pressure of a $700m contract and hailed as the savior of a sport in danger of becoming outdated and obsolete. But not Ohtani. Could it be possible this GOAT candidate could really just be nice and funny and, for lack of a better word, normal?
It is, in all likelihood, equally a testament to both Ohtani’s greatness and remarkable even keel that he was able to bounce back from a potentially explosive scandal to such a degree that it’s hasn’t even come close to being the defining story of his season. It’s been said that Ohtani’s calm and respectful nature come as a result of Japanese culture, and while that’s likely at least partially true, I am also struck by his ease and joviality. They are somewhat uncommon characteristics for a competitor of his caliber, and traits that can’t really be attributed to geographical origins.
“He’s a little kid in a grown man’s body,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy tells me. “He doesn’t like to take things too seriously, he likes to have fun. He’s always smiling, always trying to joke around. You definitely would have no idea he’s the guy that he is – if you knew nothing about baseball, and you’d never seen him before – you wouldn’t think that he was a big deal with how he acts.”
Teoscar Hernández, the Dodgers left fielder who is also in his first year with the club, and has developed a close friendship with Ohtani despite their language barrier, agrees. “He’s one of those guys, always, if you sit next to him and talk to him, he’s gonna be fun. He makes a lot of jokes, and you know, he’s a good guy,” Hernández says. “Everybody sees him as a quiet guy, a serious guy, but I think he’s the opposite. I just think, when he’s here,” he gestures to the field, “he’s focused.”
Ebel has a similar hypothesis, nodding to Ohtani’s famously meticulous habits of preparation: “When he’s inside [the clubhouse], you see Shohei. When he comes out [to the field], it’s more of like, to me, I’m focused now, this is my job.”
It’s not uncommon for stars to have on- and off-field personas. But to remain so grounded and easygoing behind the scenes when faced with international megastardom certainly isn’t the norm. Ohtani has been a household name back in Japan since his days at Hanamaki Higashi High School, where he made headlines by throwing a then-record 160 km/h (99 mph) fastball as an 18-year-old at the Summer Koshien, the national high school baseball championships which enthrall the whole country much like March Madness in the United States.
His profile only climbed during brilliant five-year stint with Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball, where he won a championship in 2016 before breaking into MLB with the Angels two seasons later. And it’s grown exponentially in the years since, as debates on roundtable sports-talk shows over whether he’s the greatest of all time have become more and more commonplace.
I ask shortstop Miguel Rojas if Ohtani’s down-to-earth nature came as a surprise, given the immense hype around him and the enormity of his fame. “Definitely, 100%,” he says. “Because I’ve played with other stars in the game that are different, and they’re needy. At some point, they need a lot of people around them, because they’re superstars. They can’t live a regular life, like any other players that can actually go out and do stuff. But to me, this place, for Shohei, is kind of a getaway from a lot of things.”
Rojas says he found it surprising “how normal and how kind of natural” Ohtani was as soon as he arrived in Los Angeles. “He’s always laughing, he’s into getting to know his teammates. [He’s] interested in what you like, and expressing what he likes as well. He’s a pretty normal, down-to-earth guy.”
Longtime Dodgers manager Dave Roberts describes Ohtani as “workmanlike”, saying that he’s “very respectful, very humble” and that he “treats everyone the same”. “Honestly,” Roberts says, “every day, and in every interaction, he’s very present and engaging.”
As the Dodgers prepare to open their postseason on Saturday against those same Padres in the best-of-five National League Division Series, Roberts says that Ohtani’s enthusiasm and excitement for his long-awaited debut on baseball’s biggest stage is contagious and appreciated. “I think the thing I’m seeing with Shohei, is this is all new to him. And this is something, you could argue, he’s waited his whole life for: to play in the postseason in the big leagues,” Roberts says. “So you see his focus, his excitement, and his joy,and his energy. And that’s what I want from every single guy, whether they’ve played in 50 playoff games or haven’t played in a playoff game yet. I think that’s part of the recipe for success.”
In my conversation with Ebel I recount some of the anecdotes I’ve heard throughout the clubhouse about Ohtani, like Hernández mentioning that they swap stories about his native Dominican Republic and Ohtani’s Japan, and how every person I talk to seems to have genuine fondness for him. It’s hard to fathom that they’re describing one of the most famous athletes on the planet, and I ask Ebel if he thinks that’s the real Shohei. He leans in. “That’s who he is. Really, deep down, someone who cares. And he wants to just be Shohei Ohtani the person.”
