This past season, he was baseball’s best hitter and, impossibly, its best pitcher, too. And then he got hurt.
Ohtani is in that tiny echelon of athletes who not only transcend a sport but transform it.Even now, a month later, it has the quality of a dream. In the second game of a doubleheader, the pitcher from the day’s first game stands in the batter’s box. He is a right-handed hurler, perhaps the most unhittable pitcher in baseball. And he is a left-handed slugger, the league leader in home runs. He is tall, six feet four, but ideally proportioned—baseball’s Vitruvian Man.
Baseball is a game of moments, and many of the most memorable moments this season have belonged to Ohtani. Ohtani, pitching for Japan, striking out his Angels teammate Mike Trout, who was playing for the United States, on a full count, to Now the regular season is ending and the postseason is beginning—without the Angels, who, as is their habit, wasted the talent of Ohtani and his superstar teammate Trout, fading from playoff contention after the trade deadline. And the moment I can’t stop thinking about isn’t a blast from the plate or a heater from the mound. It’s Ohtani’s encounter with De La Cruz at second base. Is he real? Yes, the answer came with a laugh.
Ohtani came back after his first Tommy John surgery, of course. And he did what he must have felt he needed to do: throw harder and harder, despite the risk. He trained with weighted balls, which are known to help increase pitch velocity but which also, according to what limited evidence there is, put the elbow under extra stress. This past season, Ohtani’s fastball averaged close to ninety-seven miles per hour; it was almost a hundred when Ohtani faced Team U.S.A.
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