Shohei Ohtani: Pick up the trash

Miami, March 21, 2023. World Baseball Classic final, top of the ninth, Japan up 3-2. Shohei Ohtani is on the mound. Mike Trout is at the plate: the U.S. captain, and Ohtani's Angels teammate since 2018. Two outs.

Ohtani opened with a slider low. Trout swung through 100. Another fastball sailed outside. Trout swung through 99.8 over the middle. Then 101.6, low and way off the plate. Full count. Ohtani went back to the slider, and Trout swung and missed. Ballgame. Japan's first WBC title since 2009. Ohtani hit .435 for the tournament, went 2-0 with a save on the mound and was named MVP.

You've seen that clip. What most people never saw was the pregame, when Ohtani spoke to Japan's clubhouse and told his teammates to stop admiring the stars in the other dugout.

"If you admire them, you can't surpass them. We came here to surpass them, to reach the top. For one day, let's throw away our admiration for them and just think about winning."

Shohei Ohtani, to Japan's clubhouse before the World Baseball Classic final, March 21, 2023, in a Los Angeles Times translation of video posted by Samurai Japan

Name the goal. Then go get it. That habit didn't start in Miami. It started on a sheet of paper in Iwate.

WatchThe final at-bat: Ohtani vs. Trout, 2023 WBCFOX Sports

Video: FOX Sports. Plays muted; tap for sound.

Eighty-one boxes

Hanamaki Higashi High School, Iwate Prefecture. The manager, Hiroshi Sasaki, had his players fill out a goal sheet: a grid of nine squares, each one split into nine more. The big goal goes in the middle. Everything it takes to get there goes around it.

Ohtani's center box: be the first-round pick of eight pro teams. Around it he wrote what he'd need. Ball control. Sharp movement. A breaking ball. Physical fitness. Mental strength. Character. Luck. The last square held a number: 160 kilometers an hour.

Then he broke those down into things a teenager could actually do every day. Keep your room clean. Respect the umpires. Be a person people root for. Pick up the trash.

The 160 was Sasaki's number, not his. Back then Ohtani was 190 centimeters tall, about 6-foot-3, and 63 kilograms, about 139 pounds, with a fastball near 140 km/h, roughly 87 mph. Sasaki told him he'd get to 160. Ohtani has said that to him, at 15, it was an impossible number. Later Sasaki found a sheet Ohtani had put up on his own in the team weight room. It said 163.

Sasaki had another rule for his pitchers. The mound is the top of the field, the stage. So for the rest of the day, the pitchers got the bathrooms.

"For the rest of the day I tell them, 'You have to do the lowest job.' Shohei never complained."

Hiroshi Sasaki, Ohtani's high school manager, to Jeff Fletcher for his 2022 book Sho-Time, as reported by CNBC

He was careful with him, too. Ohtani didn't pitch in games until after his first summer on the team. When a growth-plate injury hit his arm, Sasaki pulled him from the rotation to let it heal, big summer tournament or not. In July 2012, in the Iwate regional semifinals, Ohtani hit 160. No Japanese high school pitcher had thrown harder.

One team

Here's the twist in the center box. On October 21, 2012, Ohtani announced he was skipping Japan's pro league to sign straight with a major league club. The Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers were in on him. Most NPB teams backed off.

He didn't get eight first-round picks. He got one. The Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters took him anyway.

Then they made their case. They sat down with Ohtani and his parents and walked them through a presentation called "The Path to Realizing Shohei Ohtani's Dream." It showed that almost every Japanese player who had thrived in the majors, Yu Darvish included, came up through NPB first. And the Fighters had a plan to let him pitch and hit. Their manager, Hideki Kuriyama, kept meeting with him to sell it. By December he was a Fighter, wearing Darvish's old No. 11.

It worked. In 2016 he hit .322 with 22 homers, posted a 1.86 ERA with 174 strikeouts in 140 innings, won the Pacific League MVP and helped the Fighters win the Japan Series. He was the first player named to the Best Nine as both a pitcher and a designated hitter.

663 days

The two-way life has a cost. He came over to the Angels in 2018 and had Tommy John surgery on October 1 that year. On August 23, 2023, he tore the UCL in his right elbow again. On September 19, the same surgeon, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, operated on it a second time.

Less than three months later he signed with the Dodgers: 10 years, $700 million. Here's the part that got lost in the number. He deferred $680 million of it, without interest, and takes $2 million a season while he plays. His agent, Nez Balelo, said the idea came from Ohtani, so the club could spend on other players. Balelo called it "the epitome of thinking about others."

He couldn't pitch in 2024, so he just hit. That was also the year it came out that his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had stolen nearly $17 million from him to cover gambling debts. Mizuhara was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison.

On the field, September 19, 2024, in Miami: 6-for-6, three homers, two steals, 10 RBIs in a 20-4 win. He became the first player in major league history with 50 homers and 50 steals in a season. He finished at 54 and 59, won another MVP, and the Dodgers won the World Series.

On June 16, 2025, he finally took the mound again, at Dodger Stadium against the Padres. One inning, 28 pitches, a run, a fastball at 100. It was his first big league pitch in 663 days. The one before it came the day the elbow tore.

My turn

October 17, 2025. NLCS Game 4, Dodgers up 3-0 on the Brewers. Ohtani led off the bottom of the first with a homer, the first leadoff home run by a pitcher in major league history. He hit two more, one of them 469 feet. On the mound he threw shutout ball into the seventh: two hits, 10 strikeouts. The Dodgers swept, and he was NLCS MVP.

"This time around it was my turn to be able to perform."

Shohei Ohtani, through his interpreter, after NLCS Game 4 against the Brewers, October 17, 2025, as reported by the Associated Press

Shohei Ohtani at bat in Seoul — Ohtani at bat against the Padres in the Seoul Series, March 2024.Photo: U.S. Embassy Seoul / Public domain

Ten days later, World Series Game 3 against Toronto went 18 innings. Ohtani reached base nine times: two homers, two doubles, five walks, four of them intentional. Freddie Freeman won it with a homer in the 18th. Ohtani was starting Game 4 the next night, and he knew exactly what he needed. "I want to go to sleep as soon as possible so I can get ready," he said.

Game 7, November 1, in Toronto. He started on three days' rest, only the second time in his big league career, and touched 100.9. But Bo Bichette took him deep, and he was gone in the third after 51 pitches. The Dodgers came back anyway. Miguel Rojas tied it with a homer in the ninth, Will Smith homered in the 11th, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto closed out a 5-4 win. Back-to-back champions, the first since the Yankees won three straight from 1998 to 2000.

On November 13 he won the NL MVP: 55 homers at the plate, 62 strikeouts in 47 innings on the mound. His fourth MVP. All four unanimous.

The knee

2026 was supposed to be the full two-way year. It opened in March at the WBC, where defending champion Japan met Venezuela in a quarterfinal in Miami. Ohtani led off the bottom of the first with a 427-foot homer off Ranger Suárez, his third of the tournament. Venezuela came back to win 8-5. Ohtani popped out to end it.

Back in L.A., the pitching finally looked like the sheet. Through his first 10 starts he allowed five earned runs. Then, on June 11 at Pittsburgh, his left knee flared up, the same knee he'd had surgery on in 2019. Over his last four starts he gave up 12 earned runs in 24 2/3 innings. His last start came July 3 against San Diego, when a right biceps issue first showed up. He was scratched from his next turn, skipped the All-Star Game in Philadelphia and got an injection in the knee over the break. The bullpen sessions stopped. He finished with a 1.79 ERA in 85 2/3 innings, and hitters batted .179 against him.

The bat went with it. Through August 18 he was one of the five best hitters in baseball. His last regular-season homer came that day, at Coors Field. In September he struck out 39 percent of the time and spent two weeks on the injured list with the left knee and right biceps injuries, his first IL trip in nearly three years. He finished with 30 homers, a .275 average and an .889 OPS.

In October, Dave Roberts batted him fifth in Game 3 of the Division Series, the lowest he'd hit in more than six years. The Dodgers got past Atlanta in four. Then Milwaukee, the team he'd buried a year earlier, took the first two games of the NLCS. For Game 3, Roberts dropped him to sixth. The Brewers won that one too.

October 15, Game 4, back at leadoff. In the second inning he hit a 428-foot three-run homer off his old teammate Dustin May, his first homer since August 18. The Dodgers led 4-0. Milwaukee came back and won 6-4, and in the seventh, with one out and the tying run at third, Ohtani struck out. Sweep. The three-peat was over. He hit .192 for the postseason.

"I think he's the best player on the planet, and he's not completely healthy."

Dave Roberts, Dodgers manager, after NLCS Game 4, October 15, 2026, as reported by the Associated Press

Still on the sheet

After the last game, he was asked about pitching next year. "Yes, definitely," he said through his interpreter, Will Ireton. Whether that means a procedure this offseason, he said, was hard to tell at this point.

He's 32. He has four MVPs, two rings, a WBC title and a 50/50 season. And the habits from that grid never left. He began picking up trash in high school, believing it meant picking up luck. Even in the majors, on a $700 million contract, he has been known to pick up garbage when he sees it on the field.

The kid in Iwate wrote eight teams in the center box and got one. He wrote 160 and threw it. He wrote pick up the trash, and he still does. Nobody is grading that box anymore.

"Looking forward to having a better season next year."

Shohei Ohtani, through his interpreter, Will Ireton, after the Dodgers were swept in the NLCS, October 15, 2026, as reported by MLB.com

GAMECHANGER^™

Reporting draws on the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, MLB.com, CNBC, CBS Sports, NBC Los Angeles, ABC7, The Ringer, Nippon.com, the Harvard Gazette, Nichi Bei News, theScore, Bleacher Report and Baseball-Reference.

Sources (34)

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