Shohei Ohtani is a marvel.
My Major League career spanned the heart of the steroid era in baseball. Its harmful cloud still makes us question today’s players and their motives, and tempts any player to consider modern shortcuts to gain an advantage.
But the biggest damage he did was stealing our ability to surprise us, both fans and players.
When I was a Small League player, playing for local businesses like Joey’s Children’s Wear or Carratura Construction, I would see the practice of batting in a Major League game every time we arrived early enough. Growing up in New Jersey, he would go to Yankee Stadium or Shea. I watched the trajectories, waiting four seconds for the ball to fall. Baseballs looked like planets, orbiting the brilliance of talent on the field. Where would their orbit take them? Everything seemed possible.
I learned to judge the high ones. He needed to know if a fielder could catch him, or should have caught him, to speak intelligently in the inevitable debates. I was also able to hold my breath after feeling like the fence could be blown up. The definitive crescendo in the score of baseball.
I became one of those players, but I never lost the power to surprise for amazing moments. It didn’t have to come from the guy with the best fast ball or the most prodigious power, it could come from anyone, anywhere. I couldn’t want it, I couldn’t devise it, and even when I tried, I could never understand how it would be received. In 1999, I managed to surpass 200 hits in one season, but how could I have imagined that my 200 hit would come with a home run against the team that had changed me?
Just when I saw the beating practice of Vladimir Guerrero Sr. to see how hard and far he could hit a ball, or Billy Wagner throwing fireballs, I was even more excited when I saw Eddie Oropesa reunite with his family, whom he had not seen in years after deserting from Cuba .
The game is legitimately called “The Show,” and from Curt Schilling’s power accuracy to Scott Rolen’s after-home trotting and Jimmy Rollins’ sixth sense at the bases, it was an everyday fact to be amazed by my teammates. team and my opponents. But you never knew when it was going to happen. You just saw the ingredients moving in the bowl to mix until the right combination fused and started to glow.
I played against the best; I played with the best. There are players who make you look at the replay to get a second look, and then there are players who make you look at the stars. Ohtani is that star, distant for his unimaginable and unattainable talent, but our closest star for the brilliance he shows on the field, revitalizing our game. It has all the ingredients to do magic at any time.
I can tell you some mechanical truths of Ohtani to give you context. I can’t remember a batsman being able to constantly make a throw for which he was hit and still hit it for a home run to the opposite field. It turns an emergency swing, a swing aimed at defense and caution, into a weapon and reduces first-class launchers to space dust. But he can also defeat the best hitters with his arm, handing out glittering splitters and teleporting straight like 100 mph rockets. This combination places him only in the sky, a rare comet that reduces us all to Rosetta spacecraft trying to land on the surface.
However, he chooses not to be alone, but seeks to bring the game with him, challenging him to see that he can follow him.
Years ago, long before Ohtani arrived in the United States, I interviewed Masanori Murakami, the first Japanese player to play in the major leagues (for the San Francisco Giants). He came to the United States in the mid-sixties when we faced the social revolution, and was a teammate of future Hall of Fame members Willie McCovey, Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Duke Snider, Juan Marichal, and Gaylord Perry. I asked him which Japanese player he was most excited about right now. He replied without hesitation.
“Shohei Ohtani.”
A teenager right now.
I connected and saw the power and the arm, the way Ohtani could turn on the radar, but it takes more than that to be an agent of change. Talent can be bought or even shot in your arm, but Ohtani had soul, defied roles and labels, and lived in the previously unknown space between the beat box and the mound. You wonder if he could throw himself.
In my years in the sport, I have seen a team support a teammate when he lost his sister in his homeland of the Dominican Republic and the power of unity as we travel after 11 of September, when players from all over the world supported each other.
He was talking about how someone can support you, understand you, can change your heart without saying a word. Much of the game is not verbal. A hand on your shoulder, a pat on the back, the look in your eyes.
On the field, in baseball, there’s not much to say until time does its job. During the game, in the present, we make signals, we sign, we gasp, we talk without speaking. Who is covering in a double play, what throw comes, where he should play when the batsman receives two strikes.
There is a universal language that we learn to understand. Much is unwritten, which describes a variety of expectations around respect, honor, and celebration. It is transformed and shaped without a sentence being uttered, edited by time, tradition kicks and shouts along the way. He implores us not to obsess over predetermining who gets to be an editor.
The game is most hopeful when it embraces how its art knows nothing of the limitations of our self-imposed constructions … that our uniform, our city are bonds strong enough to keep the ego at the door, although society might remind us of its social batting lineup. An lineup that doesn’t win games.
I’ve seen balls hit a mile challenging what my experience told me was possible, and my suspended disbelief didn’t stay suspended when I learned the scope of the amount of performance improvement that plagued the game. It was like revealing the secret of a magic trick. A part of us wants to stay forever in our Little League uniform and delight in the blind faith of innocence. But while magic is important even to Major League players, integrity is more important.
Ohtani has renewed that sense of surprise, an opportunity to be surprised again, pulling the childhood of the perennial All-Stars and season ticket holders alike. He takes me back to my first home run on the fence in the Small Leagues, when I was 9 years old. I got along well with Mike Wilkins, 1 blond-haired Goliath who had to measure 10 feet tall. I ran around the bases in a fog, amazed at how it produced, and then I felt, the unfathomable. Ohtani is this opportunity to see how much a player, teammate or opponent, can surprise you and redraw the lines of our imagination. It pushes us to remember how important it is to open our hearts and minds to what is much greater than us.
I am grateful to Ohtani for restoring what the steroid era took away from me, a doubt that took away from me the ability to know what was truly great. The unfortunate truth that the magicians in my game cared more about themselves than anything else, ignoring the importance of how to get there. Or, as my mother would say, “They want to get there without going.”
So this week it’s appropriate for Ohtani to go out on the field at Williamsport, home of the World Series of Small Leagues. He has the ability on a Major League field to make it look like he’s hitting in a park where he’s only 225 feet away from the fences, but he also has the ability to get back to opponents and All-Star teammates in his own me 10 years.
The path you take is important, and Shohei Ohtani has reminded us that wonder is a necessary aspect of progress. Seeing our own reflection in others, expecting a better version of ourselves, knowing that our brightness does not require the attenuation of others and that we can understand this to the core, without saying a word.