It is also appearing increasingly likely that he’ll lead the Los Angeles Dodgers to a World Series appearance; it would be fitting for a rollercoaster 2024 campaign to conclude with the face of Major League Baseball (MLB) gleefully lifting the Commissioner’s Trophy aloft.
Put simply, Ohtani is a baseball phenomenon. He is an icon in his baseball-mad homeland of Japan and has become the sport’s biggest star in the USA, doing things no other player can.
Having dominated Japanese baseball for half a decade with the superbly-named Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, he made the move to the United States in 2018 as a 23-year-old and joined the Los Angeles Angels. The history of Japanese stars making the switch to MLB is a mixed bag, to say the least. For every Ichiro Suzuki or Hideki Matsui-shaped success story, there are plenty of highly touted prospects who flame out.
And the challenge facing Ohtani was even greater, as he tried to make it as a two-way player – a hitter and a pitcher. For context, there are currently no other two-way players in MLB and you have to go back to the first half of the 20th century to find anyone doing it particularly successfully. Either pitching or hitting at the major league level is unbelievably hard but to do both...?
And Ohtani didn’t just do both, he immediately excelled.
He won American League (AL) Rookie of the Year honours with the Angels in 2018 and after injury blighted his 2019 and 2020 campaigns somewhat, 2021 saw him ascend to truly elite status and become the best player in baseball. He made history by dominating with bat and ball, being unanimously voted as AL MVP, and The Sporting News ranked his campaign as the greatest season of all time, in any sport.
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