Ohtani's daughter will be a show-and-tell superstar

The 3-time MVP became a father last weekend. A new book, "L.A. Story," chronicles the rest.

Shohei and Mamiko

Shohei Ohtani became a father on Saturday. His new daughter will have two young, loving parents and a faithful friend in Decoy, Ohtani’s first-pitch-running dog. When Ohtani disclosed the news on Instagram, he got 26,000 likes and 6,000 comments, and his message was, as always, distinctive and relatable: “I am so grateful to my loving wife who gave birth to our healthy, beautiful daughter. To my daughter, thank you for making us very nervous yet super anxious parents.”

Ohtani included a photo of two hands holding the baby’s feet. If she is anything like her dad or her mom Mamiko, who spent four years playing pro basketball for the Fujitsu Red Wave, that will be one of the few times she’s constrained.

In future months, it would not be surprising to learn that the youngest Ohtani has learned to change her own diaper while she prepares her own formula. One can expect her to memorize “Goodnight Moon” in both languages and to not only ride a tricycle but assemble it.

Such are the expectations of anyone related to the 3-time Most Valuable Player, which is why the newborn girl is fortunate to have parents who are so mindful of privacy, as is Dad’s baseball employer. The burden would be greater if Ohtani had fathered a son, and perhaps that’s next on the agenda. But the frenzy that accompanies Ohtani, no matter what he does, is fierce and unique.

Bill Plunkett, who covers the Dodgers for the Southern California News Group publications, went to Japan last month for the Dodgers’ first two regular-season games in Japan. He says you can only comprehend the dimensions of Ohtani in Japan by envisioning Michael Jordan plus Patrick Mahomes plus Tiger Woods with maybe a dash of Snoop Dogg thrown in. Plunkett himself became a popular subject in Japanese newspapers in the spring of 2024 when he used some Japanese in a conversation with Ohtani and unearthed the explanation for Ohtani’s preference for indoor batting practice.

It follows that Plunkett’s book “L.A. Story” is a hot commodity in Japanese bookstores (and is available domestically as well). It details Ohtani’s debut season with the Dodgers, in which he raged through Major League Baseball like a benevolent Marvel character and achieved things that were even beyond his own scope, like a 50-50 season of home runs and stolen bases. He became the only player besides Frank Robinson to win an MVP award in both leagues, and he was front and center in the Dodgers’ quest to win their first full-season World Series since 1988. Freddie Freeman was the World Series MVP as Ohtani battled a shoulder problem, and the Game 5 clincher, in which the Yankees momentarily forgot how to play baseball, was typical of how the Dodgers’ opponents kept disintegrating. Like basketball players terrorized by the thought of landing on Jordan’s poster, the rest of baseball cowered before Ohtani’s power and speed.

Ohtani will turn 30 on July 5. This is his eighth season, but he’s only played 150-plus games in three of those seasons. He won two of his MVPs in those seasons and won the other one when he played 135 games for the Angels in 2023 and won the Slash Triple Crown (on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and the sum of those parts, also known as OPS). He also won 10 games and lost five on the mound that year, with a 3.11 ERA and an excellent 1.061 WHIP (walks and hits per inning). In 86 career starts Ohtani has struck out 11.4 batters per nine innings and has an OPS of 1.082. Only five active pitchers have an OPS under 1.100.

Ohtani did not pitch in 2024 and there are no concrete plans for him to pitch this season. Who knows if he ever will? The history of pitchers dealing with their second Tommy John surgery is not great. But then the history of players doing what Ohtani does is nonexistent. That’s Ohtani’s ultimate victory, the fact that he arrived in MLB with trumpets blaring and, instead of falling short of the hype, now walks around with a full philharmonic. Maybe that’s why his story is almost numbing. It’s difficult to comprehend what is happening before our eyes and ears, and then it happens so often, and without retreat, that it reverts to normality.

In truth Ohtani has fought through injury, team futility in Anaheim, and the revelation in spring training of 2024 that Ippei Mizahara, Ohtani’s interpreter and right-hand man, had stolen $17 million from Ohtani’s accounts to settle gambling debts. That could have shattered Ohtani because Mizahara was so essential, but he eventually addressed all the details, was cleared by Major League Baseball of suspicions that he was involved in gambling, and went on to make baseball history on multiple levels. As manager Dave Roberts said, Ohtani turned a negative into a positive, becoming more open with his teammates after he’d been shielded by Mizahara.

So perhaps baseball should force fans to spend five minutes of daily meditation on what Ohtani has done and is doing.

Or they could just read Plunkett’s book to realize what all the scouts realized, years ago.

Galen Carr was the Dodgers’ first witness. He was the scout who gave Ohtani an grade of 8 on a 2-to-8 scale. “Eight is a Hall of Famer,” Carr said. “This guy was throwing 100 mph. He puts the ball in play and he runs like a 3.9 down the line. What is this? Where was it manufactured? From a collection of tools standpoint, it was unprecedented in all our baseball lifetimes, certainly mine.”

The Dodgers marshalled their forces to sign Ohtani in 2017, but the National League didn’t have the designated hitter then, and the Angels signed Ohtani instead. The Dodgers actually antagonized their own players, like Justin Turner and Clayton Kershaw, by asking them to drop their plans and help in the lost cause to recruit Ohtani, who was clearly intrigued with DH-ing.

The next recruiting period was at the end of 2023, when Roberts blithely told reporters that the Dodgers had met with Ohtani even though Ohtani’s camp had imposed a news blackout and said any violating team might strike out entirely. Roberts was mortified by his gaffe but it didn’t affect the negotiations, which went the Dodgers’ way when Ohtani and agent Nez Balelo suggested the famous $700 million contract with the $680 million pot at the end of Ohtani’s rainbow.

“The people who thought this was our brainchild are definitely overstating our guts,” said general manager Andrew Friedman. At the time, most people were stretching their imaginations to envision Ohtani signing a $500 million deal, although it made sense when you added the pitching piece. Instead, Balelo threw out the $700 million number. “I’d love to have seen my poker face,” Friedman said. “And then as he got more and more into the details, by the end, I was like, okay, deal.”

The deal made it easier for the Dodgers to sign Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the premier pitcher in Japan, to a 12-year, $325 million contract, and now Yamamoto is pitching at an All-Star level.

But Ohtani is not just a mythical baseball beast who came to life. He is the extension of a process that began in 1874 when an American professor introduced baseball to students at Kaisei Academy, and gathered speed when Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx visited Japan in 1934. Then it really hit home when Japanese soldiers yelled “To hell with Babe Ruth” as they fought Americans (although the chant was actually more graphic).

In July, Ichiro Suzuki will become an official Hall of Famer, in front of a horde of Japanese fans who began renting properties for the weekend two years ago. He had 3,089 major league hits even though he didn’t come over until he was 27. He showed that Japanese players could master America’s game, but now he prepares a place for the man who is rearranging it. Who could possibly follow Ohtani? If we see a young girl carrying bat, glove, spikes and mask into a stadium someday, we’ll try not to be surprised.