It’s been a challenging year for the residents of Los Angeles. Destructive wildfires and political turmoil over the federal detention of unauthorized migrants have tested Angelenos.
But then there was Shohei Ohtani.
His exceptional performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers this season has helped the city rediscover joy and community. Perhaps most of all, people see the values of modesty and hard work in this Japanese athlete’s extraordinary talent in a quintessentially American sport.
Last Friday, Mr. Ohtani – who is both a top pitcher and batter, like Babe Ruth – struck out 10 Milwaukee Brewers players over six scoreless innings and hit three soaring home runs. That feat earned him the National League Championship MVP award and put baseball’s reigning champions into the World Series for the second consecutive year.
Baseball does not have salary caps, and Mr. Ohtani is one of the best-paid players on one of the sport’s best-resourced teams. Nevertheless, his athletic exploits and self-effacing demeanor send a message that goes beyond eye-popping dollar figures.
Over millennia, great athletes have helped “raise … humanity out of itself, … by doing something that teaches us again of how free from mortal constraints we can be,” former baseball commissioner and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti said in 1988. Such an individual, he said, “deserves all the awe he or she can get.”
Awe has not been in short supply. In a headline, the normally sedate Wall Street Journal described Mr. Ohtani’s performance as “What May Be the Greatest Game of All Time.”
“That’s the single best performance in the history of baseball,” his teammate Max Muncy told Fox News, without equivocation.
Mr. Ohtani himself viewed it as a joint effort. “We won it as a team,” he said, adding, “This time around it was my turn to be able to perform.”
For the Dodgers star, it’s a privilege rather than a personal achievement to deliver in demanding situations. After a game-winning home run earlier this year, he noted through his interpreter, “It’s actually an honor to feel the pressure because that means there’s a lot of expectations,” which he transforms into a positive impetus.
For Los Angeles, Mr. Ohtani’s “brilliance … feels like a reset button” and a “reason to believe in the purity of sports as a uniter,” wrote commentator Erick Galindo in the local media platform L.A. Taco. “I hope this beautiful, messy team of Americans – Black, Brown and White, kids from the Midwest, South, the Caribe, Latin America’s finest, Japanese phenoms … can do what it did last year: bring everyone together, at least for a few days.”
