Personality, passion, performance: Shohei Ohtani unlocking his best self in October
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES — THE MOMENT met Shohei Ohtani on Friday night, as it so often has this month — eighth inning, down a run, Game 1 of a much-hyped World Series teeming with intensity. Ohtani scorched a line drive off the right-field fence, popped up from a slide at second base and yelled toward his teammates. Realizing the baseball had scooted away, he sprinted to third, placing the tying run within 90 feet. Ohtani roared again and implored a sold-out Dodger Stadium crowd to join him. A pitching change followed, at which point Ohtani returned to his dugout to hug and high-five as many teammates as he could before resuming the task at hand.
So much was still uncertain at that point. Ohtani hadn’t yet motored home on Mookie Betts‘ sac fly; Freddie Freeman hadn’t yet delivered the walk-off grand slam in the 10th, sealing the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ 6-3 victory over the New York Yankees. And yet, to Ohtani, it didn’t seem to matter. He was once again embracing his moment — the type of moment he’d spent his whole life longing for.
“Simply put,” Ohtani said recently, “I’m grateful to be in this environment.”
Ohtani came to the United States seven years ago with a desire to compete for championships and become a legendary figure within his sport, two pursuits intrinsically linked. He then spent his first six seasons in Anaheim, California, without playing so much as a September game that mattered. Near the end of his run as an Angel, a video surfaced of Ohtani seemingly on the verge of tears after a heart-wrenching loss on Aug. 3, 2023. Losing pained him in ways he would not let on publicly, but many of those around him noticed.
Winning has seemed to unlock the best version of Ohtani. In the run-up to this postseason and now during it, Ohtani’s performance has often elevated, but so has his emotion — to a pure, unadulterated joy that has transcended language, diverged from his stoic persona and made him seem, well, human.
“He’s a regular dude, just like you and me,” Betts said. “He just has a superpower.”
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL commissioner Rob Manfred describes Ohtani as having a “regal bearing.” The cameras are always on him, but his demeanor remains positive. His singular popularity is a product of his ability to take on a two-way role and his propensity for shattering records, but also, Manfred said, “There’s a charisma, an appeal about him that draws people.”
October has brought out something else: swagger. Ohtani is sauntering after home runs, booing himself in opposing ballparks, screaming into the ears of unsuspecting teammates, quipping to questions about his nervousness and yelling at umpires who interrupt balls in play, revealing an authenticity that has often been elusive.
It’s an added layer MLB hopes to capitalize on.
“The competitiveness, the desire to win, beyond individual accolades, really has come out,” Manfred said in a phone conversation. “I think it’s added a dimension to him that’s really appealing.”
MLB displayed 113 pieces of outdoor advertising in Tokyo ahead of the playoffs. Ohtani’s first postseason series then triggered record-setting viewership in his home country. Game 5 of the National League Division Series — pitting Yu Darvish against Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the first ever postseason matchup of Japanese-born starting pitchers — became the most-watched MLB postseason game ever in Japan, with 12.9 million viewers. Another 7.5 million watched domestically, according to data provided by MLB. Game 1 of the NL Championship Series drew 20.6 million average viewers in the U.S. and Japan combined, with Ohtani’s home country providing 12.1 million.
Japan viewership numbers for the remainder of the NLCS are not yet available because the games aired on cable, rather than over the air. But it was the most watched LCS round in seven years by U.S. averages alone. Ohtani — the subject of an oft-used Fox graphic that showed when he might take his turn again and was memed all over X — drove that.
Manfred sees this World Series — featuring not just Ohtani, but Betts, Freeman, Aaron Judge, Juan Soto and Gerrit Cole playing on two of the sport’s most prominent franchises — as “an opportunity for us to grow both nationally and internationally.” His hope is that its star power will transcend regions.
“I think the most important effort we have going right now is to try to make our game more national,” Manfred said. “The way our game has been covered, particularly on the broadcast side, it’s regional sports networks — local, local, local. And I think the combination of two iconic franchises, great players … provide us with an opportunity to break out of this, ‘They’re interested in New York,’ and, ‘They’re interested in L.A.’ and getting to a mode where they’re interested all across the United States.”
THE DODGERS SIGNED Ohtani with the thought that coupling his fame with their brand would be a boon for their business, the type that might make a $700 million guarantee seem practical. But their projections, CEO Stan Kasten said, “turned out to be woefully conservative.” The Dodgers have announced sponsorship agreements with 11 different Japanese companies this year. Two Ohtani bobblehead giveaways prompted fans to line up outside their ballpark up to 10 hours before the first pitch. Japanese-guided tours through Dodger Stadium — a twice-a-day, four-day-a-week addition this season — never relented.
They underestimated all those elements. They couldn’t fathom another.
“One thing that helped us that I couldn’t have predicted,” Kasten said, “was the wall that came down once we got through that first day or two in Korea.”
What began with ESPN and The Los Angeles Times inquiring about wire transfers sent from Ohtani’s bank account to an offshore bookmaker while the Dodgers opened their season in South Korea in March ended with his longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, admitting to stealing nearly $17 million to pay off a string of gambling debts. In the wake of firing Mizuhara, who has since pleaded guilty to bank- and tax-fraud charges, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts talked about how removing such an ever-present “buffer” would open up the lines of communication with Ohtani and perhaps help him become more engaging.
The next seven months bore that out.
“We didn’t quite get to experience and take advantage of the personality that he was, the fun-loving character that he was — that didn’t come out until after we got through that awful first day in Korea,” Kasten said. “Once that came out, and once we understood better who he is, and he understood better who we are, and that we were all pulling for each other, I think that just opened him up.”
Early on, though, there were growing pains.
They manifested in higher leverage. Ohtani finished April with seven hits in 38 at-bats with runners in scoring position. And despite posting mythical numbers, his performance in run-scoring situations noticeably paled in comparison over the season’s first five months. By the end of August, Ohtani’s OPS with runners in scoring position, .682, was more than 300 points lower than it was overall.
“In the beginning of the season, I think I had a very strong desire to fit in with the team as soon as possible,” Ohtani, speaking through an interpreter, explained. “And I think that was kind of leaking into my at-bats. As the season progressed and as we got into the second half, I felt like I had more of my at-bats.”
AS THE STAKES ratcheted up in a late-season division race, those who share a clubhouse with Ohtani believe the approach of playoff baseball enlivened him.
On the night he clinched his first postseason appearance and became the charter member of the 50/50 club, Ohtani put together one of history’s greatest single-game performances, going 6-for-6 with 3 home runs, 10 RBIs and 2 stolen bases in Miami on Sept. 19. It marked the beginning of a 10-game stretch in which he went 12-for-14 with runners in scoring position.
Ohtani finished his regular season four batting-average points shy of a Triple Crown, batting .310 with 54 homers, 130 RBIs and 59 stolen bases, all but ensuring the first-ever MVP for a full-time designated hitter. And once October came around, any concerns about how Ohtani might handle the pressure of his first postseason quickly ceased.
“It never feels like there’s no moment too big, no moment too small,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “When he steps in the box, you feel like he’s going to do something special. More often than not, he doesn’t disappoint. He’s incredible.”
Ohtani’s second postseason at-bat, early in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, shook Dodger Stadium. His 31st, late in Game 3 of the following round, left a packed Citi Field stunned. The time between those two instances — a heat-seeking missile over the right-center-field fence in Los Angeles and a towering drive that sailed way above the right-field foul pole in New York — provided a bizarre juxtaposition.
Ohtani had spent much of the summer fending off concerns over his ability to produce at a game’s most important moments. Now the opposite was occurring. The latter home run made him the first expansion-era player to compile as many as 17 hits in a 20-at-bat stretch with runners in scoring position. By that point, remarkably, he was also hitless in 22 postseason at-bats with nobody on base.
Ohtani continually stated that his approach — designed to exert as much damage as possible, regardless of the situation — had not wavered. At one point he chalked it up to an anomaly. But Freeman gave him grief nonetheless. And so, the following afternoon, in Game 4 of the NL Championship Series, Ohtani hit a leadoff home run — naturally, with nobody on base — and pointed in Freeman’s direction before beginning his trot around the bases.
Some of the Dodgers’ players howled.
“He’s got a lot bigger personality than what any of us expected,” Dodgers utility man Enrique Hernández said. “He likes to joke around a lot. He likes to have a good time. He has this childish energy to him, which is great. I think that allows him to disconnect from the fact that there’s this huge pressure on his shoulders because that’s what comes with not only being the greatest player in the game but potentially, possibly, the best ever.”
Throughout this week, in the vacant space between a pennant-clinching victory and the start of a highly anticipated World Series, clips of Ohtani in revelry have continually populated digital platforms. And whether it’s getting doused in champagne by Jack Flaherty, trading beer pours with Roberts or playfully chastising others for their sobriety, Ohtani’s jubilance has been striking. They reveal a man not only enjoying his first taste of the postseason, but basking in it.
“We’ve seen his emotions grow over the year,” Dodgers reliever Alex Vesia said. “It’s just him becoming more and more himself, and being comfortable showing it.”
Perhaps it is now — on a high-profile team of stars, within the intensity of late October baseball, at a time when MLB is salivating over the potential of its biggest headliner on its grandest stage — that Ohtani’s truest self has emerged.
“He’s become, over the course of the season, I think, who he intrinsically is,” Roberts said. “He’s very isolated, very quiet, stays to himself, private. But I do think that naturally he is a goofy person. He’s fun-loving. He’s a crazy good competitor. So I think that when he sees people having fun, enjoying themselves in moments, I think we’ve seen more of that over the course of the season. I think that’s a good thing for him because it’s honest. And I think that’s a good thing for our players to see that, ‘Man, this guy is not just a robot. He’s like a real person who has emotions.'”
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.
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