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SEATTLE – As I type this from the lonely cheap seats on the high upper deck of T-Mobile Park, I’m still trying to digest what I just saw.
Shohei Ohtani, the wide-shouldered Los Angeles Angels pitcher and powerful hitter – a player as unique as Major League Baseball for generations – just unleashed a home run with such force that he left the whole stadium in a shambles. stupefied state of reverence. .
The ball flew up to the sky, and oh do I mean to the sky. Several members of the Seattle Mariners, Ohtani’s opponents on that hot night, craned their necks to follow him, then looked dismal at the ground. The crowd let out a collective gasp – a sound similar to air being released from a balloon.
“Oh my God, did this happen?” whispered a fan to his friends.
The bullet landed close enough that I could hear it slam against a concrete step. A bailiff leaned in and told me that he had worked at Mariners games for over a decade and had never seen a ball hit so high and so hard.
From where I was sitting, above the pitch, the marble seemed to be a mile away. It seemed impossible that a human being could hit a ball this far.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Shohei Ohtani has spent the entire season bending the arc of what’s possible. He seems capable of doing just about anything at home and from the pitch mound. It’s not debatable: Right now, 27-year-old Shohei Ohtani is one of the biggest shows in all of sports.
On Monday, Ohtani will headline the Home Run Derby at Coors Field in Denver. On Tuesday, he’ll hit and throw in the All-Star Game.
An argument can be made that if he keeps that pace he will end the best baseball season ever.
The Cliffs Notes, for those who don’t keep up: This top deck home run was the 33rd of the season in Ohtani. He leads the league in home runs, and if he continues that way, he could threaten Barry Bonds’ season record of 73. He rewrites the record books and humiliates a game known to deflate even its most masterful practitioners.
Ohtani did all of this while proving himself the first bona fide two-way player in generations. He is now considered one of the best pitchers in baseball. Last week, when he dominated the Boston Red Sox from the mound to push his record to 4-1, nearly 75 percent of his shots were from hitting. He threw fast balls and shuffled in slow orbital curves. It wasn’t just about throwing. It was art.
After the game, his manager, Joe Maddon, compared Ohtani to the iconic baseball icon, the last major league player to play on the mound and as an everyday player at home plate. “We all imagine what it would have been like to watch Babe Ruth play,” Maddon said. “You hear that stuff, and it’s a bigger than life, bigger concept. Now we are living it. So don’t underestimate what we are seeing.
Baseball needs Ohtani right now. The game is listed. As it has for years, baseball is fighting for the kind of great popularity it enjoyed in years past, only now it is doing so as it grapples with the backlash of a pandemic.
America also needs Ohtani right now.
Ohtani, who stands 6-foot-4 and is remarkably quick, played in Japan and in 2018 was named AHL Rookie of the Year with the Angels. But injuries and the coronavirus pandemic have kept him from developing fully. He couldn’t have timed this better, the mother of all escape seasons.
The origins of the pandemic in China have brought the madmen out. As a result, Asian Americans – recent immigrants and families who have been in the United States for generations, people with roots drawn from every nation on the Asian continent – live in a constant state of siege. They face a spike in sometimes deadly hate crimes and heinous discrimination.
In this dreadful environment, what do we find? An Asian athlete totally dominating a sport that still presents itself as the American pastime.
“He faces and is compared to the Babe Ruth of all people,” said Ron Wakabayashi, a baseball enthusiast, who retired at 76 after spending years leading the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. and before that, the League of American Citizens. “Beautiful Ruth! A guy who’s deep in the American psyche, I mean, wow. Ohtani, doing what he does, he means a lot to this community. Especially now. “
I spoke with a number of Asian American baseball fans and community leaders last week. A Buddhist priest whose temple was one of many in Los Angeles has been obnoxiously vandalized this year. University professors in love with Ohtani who study the Asian struggle for representation and belonging in the United States. Mothers, fathers and families inside the Mariners stadium.
Again and again, I have heard stories of fear and pain related to the rise of prejudice.
But I also heard something hopeful: how Ohtani’s masterful season created a calming and uplifting effect.
Wakabayashi told a story that explained it perfectly. He said he was watching his rear carefully these days during frequent five-kilometer walks in a community in the Los Angeles area where several anti-Asian attacks took place.
But during these walks, he thinks of Ohtani. And when he does, he thinks of power and courage: the great Japanese player never flinches, “never backs down”, and do everything.
In a time of great turmoil, Ohtani’s strength and drive, along with the way he moves in a baseball world with few Asian faces, “makes life a little better.”
Can sport do more only that? I do not think so.
Ohtani, who uses an interpreter to communicate with sports media in English, is silent about growing discrimination and rage in the United States. In the tradition of many notable players born in Japan before him, he is wary of just about everything except baseballs, hitting and home runs.
But it’s good. He doesn’t have to speak or express himself to make a difference. His throws and strikes, and the graceful, two-way flow he uses to dominate in the big leagues speak volumes.
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