How Shohei Ohtani happened

0:00 [Commentator] And in a one-run game, the dream match-up.

0:03 [Sam] It's easy to see why someone might call this a dream match-up,

0:06 it's the Final Out of the 2023 World

0:09 Baseball Classic between the two best baseball countries,

0:12 the USA, who invented baseball, and Japan,

0:15 whose own baseball culture has thrived for more than a century.

0:20 [Commentator] One ball, no strikes.

0:22 [Sam] It's also a match-up between the two best players,

0:24 Mike Trout, one of the best American hitters ever,

0:27 and Shohei Ohtani, the best Japanese pitcher ever,

0:30 the best Japanese hitter ever, and some say, the best baseball player ever.

0:35 [Commentator] The 1-0 pitch, swing and a miss.

0:39 A fastball at 100.

0:41 But I think this is more than a dream match-up between two great teams.

0:45 [Commentator] 2-1, 2 and 2.

0:48 [Sam] Or even two great players.

0:50 [Commentator] The count goes full.

0:51 It's the moment baseball's past,

0:53 met baseball's future- [Commentator] Ohtani's ready, Trout's ready, 3-2.

0:59 [Sam] And the future won.

1:01 [Commentator] He struck him out, Japan's back on top of the baseball world!

1:06 Yeah, that symbolized the passing of the torch,

1:08 from baseball being America's pastime, to baseball being a global game.

1:14 [Sam] This is the story of how Japan produced the best baseball player ever,

1:18 and how he's paving the way to baseball's future.

1:22 (rhythmic music) (text clicking) (playful music)- [Reporter] For many years,

1:37 the American pastime has been the Japanese pastime.

1:41 Americans introduced baseball to Japan around the 1870s,

1:44 so it's no surprise that American and Japanese baseball share a lot in common,

1:47 first and foremost, it's an obsession.

1:51 Here's a stadium packed for Japan's High School Baseball Tournament,

1:55 1920, Shinto Priests blessing home plate,

1:58 opening day 1931, and Babe Ruth, swarmed by fans in Tokyo, 1934.

2:04 The US crushed Japan in World War II,

2:06 but baseball helped the two countries become allies soon after.

2:10 [Reporter]] This isn't Big League stuff yet, but someday, it may be.

2:15 [Sam] Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball League was structured

2:18 a lot like the US' Major League Baseball,

2:20 teams were divided into two leagues, and some even shared the same name.

2:25 But the two leagues didn't always see eye to eye, in the mid-20th century,

2:29 American teams often looked down on Japanese talent,

2:32 and while some American players played in Japan,

2:35 they typically were near retirement.

2:37 Meanwhile, Japanese players were often pressured to stay in Japan.

2:40 Part of it was wanting to like maintain Japanese culture and pride.

2:46 [Sam] Joon Lee's been reporting on baseball for a decade.

2:48 He was on ESPN, now he runs one of my favorite YouTube channels.

2:52 [Commentator 2] It is swung on and foul-tipped by Lee.

2:55 This was kind of where Japan was like politically,

2:58 over the course of like a lot of the 20th century,

3:00 which was culture that was very inward-focused.

3:03 It all came to a head over this guy, pitcher, Masanori Murakami.

3:07 In 1964, the Nankai Hawks sent him

3:10 to the San Francisco Giants' Minor League team, just for some experience.

3:14 But Murakami impressed the Giants who started him on their Major League squad.

3:18 Murakami became Major League Baseball's first Japanese-born player,

3:21 and dominated the rest of the season.

3:24 But when the Giants gave him a contract, the Hawks objected,

3:27 the two leagues argued for months until reaching a compromise.

3:30 Murakami would play with the Giants for one season, then returned to Japan,

3:34 and from then on, MLB teams

3:36 were prohibited from directly signing Japanese players,

3:39 and vice versa, it widened the gulf between the two leagues.

3:43 American players continued to go to Japan,

3:45 but no Japanese player appeared in Major League Baseball for the next 30 years.

3:50 They stayed in Japan and developed a distinct style of playing.

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5:09 Japanese people are built differently than American people,

5:12 and so they have adapted the Japanese game to kind

5:15 of suit the physical strengths and weaknesses that Japanese people have,

5:20 and as a result, stylistically,

5:22 the game is very different than what you would see in the United States.

5:25 [Sam] Great American batters have power, they swing for the fences.

5:28 [Commentator 3] He's got a home run.

5:29 [Sam] While great Japanese batters have consistency,

5:32 they hit more singles, doubles, even bunts to get on base.

5:36 Great American pitchers rely on velocity,

5:38 throwing a hundred-mile-per-hour fastballs past batters.

5:41 [Commentator 3] That's his fastball.

5:42 [Sam] while Japanese pitchers rely more on craftiness,

5:44 throwing fork balls, splitters, and sinkers to fool batters.

5:48 In Japan, baseball players are also known to train

5:51 far more often and with far more intensity.

5:53 This is just kind of the culture around the sport that the repetition,

5:57 build strength, it requires this intense level of discipline.

6:01 [Sam] Still, many Americans doubted Japanese players would succeed in the US,

6:04 if they could ever get there.

6:07 Then in 1995, pitcher Hideo Nomo found a loophole.

6:12 The Kintetsu Buffaloes owned his contract, but Nomo simply retired at age 26.

6:17 Legally, a retired player could go anywhere,

6:19 so Nomo went to the LA Dodgers, his twisting wind-up flummoxed American batters,

6:24 and he went on to win Rookie of the Year, and start the All-Star Game.

6:28 [Commentator 4] waved at and missed.

6:30 And down goes Martinez, and down goes Bell,

6:33 and who would've figured Hideo Nomo, last year pitching in Japan?

6:38 [Sam] Nomo also got more Japanese fans

6:40 to start paying attention to American baseball,

6:42 but his loophole made NPB owners, worried their best players would leave.

6:47 So in 1998, it made a new system,

6:49 where a Japanese team could do what's called posting a player,

6:52 to allow MLB teams to bid on him,

6:54 then the Japanese team could send him in exchange for a fee.

6:58 Finally, a pipeline existed between the two best baseball leagues,

7:01 and over the next 20 years,

7:02 a steady stream of talented pitchers and hitters developed in Japan,

7:06 then went to the US, where they won awards and World Series,

7:10 broke records and made the Hall of Fame,

7:13 all along proving that the Japanese style could thrive in the US.

7:16 Ichiro is kind of the ultimate manifestation of this, where

7:20 he hit often less than 10 home runs a year,

7:22 but he would get 300 hits in a season,

7:25 I think that completely changed the perception of what was possible,

7:28 if we brought over Japanese players to the United States.

7:33 [Sam] But Shohei Ohtani was different.

7:36 He threw nearly a hundred miles an hour,

7:38 smashed home runs, and he was only in high school.

7:42 I first heard of Shohei Ohtani when he

7:44 was 16 years old because I'm a baseball sicko, and I was following what was

7:49 happening in the Japanese baseball tournament, Koshien.

7:53 [Sam] The century-old tournament is watched by millions in Japan,

7:56 and in 2012, everyone was watching Ohtani, including Major League teams.

8:01 He was kind of unlike any player that had ever come out of Japan.

8:06 [Sam] The Yankees, Red Sox, Rangers,

8:08 and Dodgers wanted Ohtani to skip the NPB entirely,

8:11 and sign directly with them as a pitcher, Ohtani wanted that too, In 2012,

8:15 he warned NPB teams not to draft him, but the Nippon-Ham Fighters did anyway.

8:20 It put Ohtani in a unique position, he could refuse to play for the Fighters,

8:24 or use his leverage to pressure them into letting

8:28 him do something no American team ever would.

8:32 Two-way players are a thing of the past,

8:34 that's someone who's both a pitcher and a position player, like Babe Ruth.

8:38 But since the 1940s, no one in the Major Leagues really pulled it off,

8:42 and today, no one's really allowed to try.

8:44 [Joon] Being a pitcher and a batter,

8:46 is like playing two completely different sports,

8:49 they require two completely different skill sets,

8:52 two completely different approaches,

8:54 and that wear and tear really, really adds up.

8:57 A Major League team, if they had gotten Ohtani at 18 years old,

9:00 it would've just forced him to become a pitcher.

9:02 [Sam] But the Fighters were more willing to let him try both,

9:05 so Ohtani made the fateful decision to stay in Japan.

9:09 If Ohtani had grown up in Arkansas, he doesn't become the player that he is.

9:13 He was this massive power hitter,

9:15 there's a video of him hitting a baseball into the roof of the Tokyo Dome,

9:20 (ball thudding) (crowd cheering) and the fact that he was also doing it while

9:25 being one of the best pitchers in NPB was kind of blowing everyone's mind.

9:31 [Sam] But after five years in Japan, Ohtani still faced doubts in the US.

9:35 So in 2017, when the Fighters posted him,

9:38 Ohtani turned down bids from big-market teams,

9:40 and instead went to the LA Angels, where he again,

9:44 used his leverage to be a two-way player.

9:47 In his first at bat in LA, Ohtani did this.

9:50 [Commentator 5] That's out to toward right center field.

9:54 [Commentator 6] Gone, big fly Ohtani style.

9:59 [Sam] In 2021, he hit 46 home runs, and went 9 and 2 on the mound,

10:03 becoming the first player to be an All-Star, as a hitter and a pitcher.

10:07 Ohtani was fast becoming the most exciting player baseball had seen in decades,

10:12 and by 2024, he didn't need leverage anymore,

10:15 the LA Dodgers signed him for $700 million,

10:17 nearly double the next-highest contract,

10:20 because he really was two players in one,

10:22 actually, he was the two best players in one.

10:26 Wins above Replacement measures a player's total value,

10:29 and in the last five years, Ohtani has the highest in the Majors.

10:32 And just last week, Ohtani played

10:34 probably the greatest game in baseball history, he struck out 10 batters,

10:37 and gave up only two hits over six innings, and hit not one,

10:41 not two, but three home runs, to send the Dodgers to the World Series.

10:46 Ohtani's a new kind of baseball player,

10:48 mixing American-style power and Japanese-style consistency

10:52 on both sides of the ball, but he only got the chance to do

10:55 it because he started playing baseball in Japan.

10:58 Shohei Ohtani is America's impact,

11:01 reimagined and then repackaged back to itself.

11:05 [Sam] Now, Ohtani's bringing the two

11:06 best baseball leagues closer together than ever.

11:09 [Commentator 1] Impossible Theater, and in a one-run game, the dream match-up.

11:14 [Sam] Now, why was this moment so important?

11:16 It's because it was the first moment

11:18 that Japanese baseball and American baseball shared a superstar.

11:22 In the US, it was the most watched WBC game ever, but in Japan,

11:27 42% of households tuned in, even though it was 8:00 in the morning there.

11:31 In 2025, MLB saw higher viewership across US TV,

11:35 and a 20% increase on Japanese TV, making it the most watched season ever there.

11:41 Ohtani's also getting more Japanese fans to come to Major League games.

11:45 When I asked Joon to come on his episode,

11:47 he texted back from Dodger Stadium, where he saw scores of Ohtani fans,

11:51 Ohtani jerseys in English, Japanese, Japanese beer,

11:55 and a giant homage to Ohtani on a Japanese-themed hotel.

11:59 This is just the beginning for MLB.

12:02 I had a conversation with an executive over Major League baseball,

12:05 and they said that, "Shohei Ohtani was

12:08 their entire international growth strategy." If you,

12:11 Shohei Ohtani as their Messi and Ronaldo faker,

12:14 the type of person who almost becomes bigger

12:17 than the sport to get people in the door, to care and invest emotionally in it.

12:23 Ohtani may even give MLB an edge over its competitors.

12:27 US sports leagues are racing to become global leagues,

12:30 the NFL is playing games in Europe and South America,

12:33 the NBA is in Asia, hosting a league in Africa,

12:36 and talking about creating a league in Europe.

12:38 They're competing to win over new fans in other countries,

12:41 but nothing wins over fans in another

12:43 country like a superstar from that country.

12:46 The lesson from Ohtani is that sometimes

12:48 that means letting a player do something different,

12:52 because Ohtani isn't Ohtani if he's not a two-way player,

12:56 and he's not a two-way player if he doesn't play first in Japan,

12:59 and he doesn't play first in Japan,

13:01 if not for generations of players who perfect baseball,

13:05 the Japanese way,- America invented baseball,

13:09 but it has been elevated by someone who is not from the United States.

13:14 He breaks all of the unwritten rules of what people

13:17 thought was possible for someone to accomplish as a baseball player.

13:21 (gentle music)- Okay, thanks so much for watching,

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