The American National Pastime’s Great Japanese Hope
Can a Once-in-a-Lifetime Athlete Change Baseball’s Fortunes?
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If you don’t know who Shohei Ohtani is, you should.
It doesn’t matter whether you love baseball, hate it, or couldn’t care less.
Before those in the latter two groups stop reading, this column is about more than baseball and one highly unusual superstar. It’s about American identity and sports elevating the human spirit.
But it all starts with Ohtani.
Major League Baseball selected him unanimously as the American League’s Most Valuable Player in the fall. Two days ago, Sporting News chose Ohtani as its Athlete of the Year, following in the footsteps of The Associated Press, which named him its Male Athlete of the Year earlier in the week.
To be clear, both news organizations selected Ohtani as not just the best baseball player, but best overall athlete. And Sporting News went even further: It chose Ohtani’s season as the greatest individual season in the history of sportshe greatest individual season in the history of sports. All sports.
For perspective, the AP and Sporting News selected Ohtani over the much more well-known Tom Brady. That’s even though Brady, at 43, took a new team to a Super Bowl victory for his seventh championship ring, more than any other player or franchise. Oh, and Brady also broke the all-time record for most passes completed a few weeks ago.
They also passed over the great Caeleb Dressel. The American swimmer dominated in the Olympic pool in Tokyo, winning more gold medals than any other athlete at the Summer Games.
While Brady and Dressel were exceptional, Ohtani is one of a kind, unmatched in baseball history.
What Exactly Is the Big Deal About Ohtani?
In an era where athletes of all types specialize in their chosen sports and kids are encouraged to stop competing in different disciplines and focus on specific positions, Ohtani has done the opposite.
As the AP described it, he “put together a season with no analogue in the past century,” with a performance that made him one of baseball’s best batters and also one of its best pitchers.
Shohei Ohtani pitches for the Los Angeles Angels in a game against the Oakland Athletics on Sept. 19, 2021, at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif.
Nobody had come close to doing that since Babe Ruth in 1919, and even the legendary Bambino never had as great a pitching/hitting season as Ohtani did in 2021.
And Ohtani is also one of the game’s fastest baserunners and most prolific base stealers.
Becoming a three-way baseball superstar is so unlikely that Jayson Stark in The Athletic wrote about “the sheer improbability that somebody like Ohtani could exist on this earth.”
Sports writers often veer into hyperbole like that, but it’s hard to fault Sporting News when it celebrates Ohtani saying: “What the norm-slaying, jaw-dropping, quasi-superhero unanimous AL MVP did this year for the Angels, and for baseball at large, was so amazing that it makes the debate over which athletes had the best season barely worth having.”
I’ll spare the non-baseball fans any detailed statistics except one that the AP did not list. “Wins Above Replacement” looks at a player’s value to his team, as in the extra wins his team achieved compared to what it would have won if he’d been replaced with an average player.
Ohtani’s WAR exceeded 9 in 2021. No other player came close to 8.
As Chicago Cubs pitching star Marcus Stroman tweeted, “Ohtani is a mythical legend in human form.”
If all that weren’t enough, the 27-year-old Ohtani, who’s only played four seasons in MLB after starting his career in his native Japan, is, by all accounts, a low-key, modest, gracious, and delightful human being. The whole package he’s bringing to the table is turning the Japanese star into an international icon and America’s favorite baseball player.
Why Ohtani Matters to Baseball and Beyond
As the famous old jingle said, few things are as American as “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolet.”
Of those, baseball is probably the one whose status is mostly challenged.
Traditionalists like me will still argue that baseball’s history allows it to retain its title as America’s national pastime, but football has long surpassed it as the country’s most popular sport. A Bloomberg Politics poll in 2015 revealed that only 28% of those surveyed believed baseball remained the national pastime, while 67% chose football.
Over the last few decades, baseball’s popularity has taken hit after hit from strikes, lockouts (including one currently), increasingly long games, late-night games after most kids’ bedtimes, uninspired leadership, and a widespread performance-enhancing drug scandal that tarnished many of the game’s major stars.
A terrific article by CJ Kelly titled “Strike Three: Baseball Is Dead,” extensively details the sport’s crisis. He puts it into context by describing how baseball was once so popular that it could paralyze the country. As an example, he cites how Game 1 of the 1963 World Series, an early afternoon game, brought trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange to a virtual standstill and record lows.
As recently as 1986, World Series games averaged more than 36 million viewers. Since then, the audience has gradually pulled a vanishing act. In 2020, average viewers dropped below 10 million for the first time (2021 was a little better, with 11.75 million).
Attendance to regular season MLB games has also plunged from more than 78.6 million in 2008 to 68.5 million in 2019. Hurt by COVID restrictions in 2021, attendance plummeted even further to 45.3 million.
The biggest issue is an aging fan base that is not being replaced by youth participation. While the number of kids playing baseball increased slightly toward the end of the past decade, Little League participation has seen average 3% annual declines since the 1990s.
Sports, with baseball prominent among them, help build social cohesion and strong connections among different generations of families and communities. And they bring plain old happiness to tens of millions of people every day.
Baseball is also an essential part of America’s historical identity and its decline should concern us all.
The sport needs Shohei Ohtani and other stars of the future if it hopes to return to anything resembling the glory of its past. Only they can inspire our kids to take up the national pastime and make baseball cool again.
Cover photo: Shohei Ohtani celebrates with his Los Angeles Angels teammates after hitting a solo home run during the third inning against the Seattle Mariners at T-Mobile Park on July 9, 2021, in Seattle.
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