Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani (Japanese: 大谷 翔平, Hepburn: Ōtani Shōhei, pronounced [oːtaɲi ɕoːheː]; born July 5, 1994) is a Japanese professional baseball pitcher and designated hitter for the Los Angeles Dodgers of Major League Baseball (MLB). Nicknamed “Shotime“, he has previously played in MLB for the Los Angeles Angels and in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

-To know about your favorite celebrities visit Celebswikipedia

Shohei Ohtani
Los Angeles Dodgers – No. 17
Pitcher / Designated hitter
Born: July 5, 1994 (age 30) Ōshū, Iwate, Japan
Bats: Left Throws: Right
Professional debut
NPB: March 29, 2013, for the Hokkaidō Nippon-Ham Fighters
MLB: March 29, 2018, for the Los Angeles Angels
NPB statistics (through 2017 season)
Win–loss record	42–15
Earned run average	2.52
Strikeouts	624
Batting average	.284
Hits	297
Home runs	48
Runs batted in	166
MLB statistics (through 2024 season)
Win–loss record	38–19
Earned run average	3.01
Strikeouts	608
Batting average	.282
Home runs	225
Runs batted in	567
Stolen bases	145
Teams
Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters (2013–2017) Los Angeles Angels (2018–2023) Los Angeles Dodgers (2024–present)
Career highlights and awards
NPB Japan Series champion (2016) 5× NPB All-Star (2013–2017) Pacific League MVP (2016) 2× Pacific League Pitcher Best Nine (2015–2016) Designated Hitter Best Nine (2016) Pacific League ERA leader (2015) Pacific League Battery Award (2015) MLB 4× All-Star (2021–2024) 2× AL MVP (2021, 2023) 4× All-MLB First Team (2021–2023²) 2× All-MLB Second Team (2021, 2022) AL Rookie of the Year (2018) 2× Silver Slugger Award (2021, 2023) AL Hank Aaron Award (2023) 2× home run leader (2023, 2024) NL RBI leader (2024) Team Japan World Baseball Classic MVP (2023) 2× All-World Baseball Classic Team (2023) WBSC All-World Team (2015) WBSC Player of the Year (2015) 3× Japan Professional Sports Grand Prize (2016, 2018, 2023)
Medals Men’s baseball Representing  Japan World Baseball Classic 2023 Miami Team WBSC Premier12 2015 Tokyo Team

Shohei Ohtani
Ohtani’s name in kanji
Japanese name
Kanji	大谷 翔平
Hiragana	おおたに しょうへい

Because of his elite contributions as a hitter and as a pitcher, a rarity as a two-way player, Ohtani’s 2021–2024 seasons are considered among the greatest in baseball history, with some comparing them favorably to the early career of Babe Ruth.
Considered early on as an elite two-way player, Ohtani was the first pick of the Fighters in the 2012 draft. He played in NPB for the Fighters from 2013 through 2017 as a pitcher and an outfielder, and won the 2016 Japan Series with them. The Fighters posted Ohtani to MLB after the 2017 season, and he signed with the Angels, soon winning the 2018 American League (AL) Rookie of the Year Award.

Following an injury-plagued 2019 and 2020, Ohtani hit 46 home runs and struck out 156 batters en route to winning his first AL Most Valuable Player Award (MVP) in 2021, a statistically unprecedented two-way season that saw him bestowed with the Commissioner’s Historic Achievement Award. In 2022, he became the first player in the modern era to qualify for both the hitting and pitching leaderboards in one season, finishing third in the AL with 219 strikeouts.

Ohtani won his second AL MVP in 2023, leading the AL with 44 home runs while recording 10 wins as a pitcher. He was the first player to win multiple unanimous MVPs and the first Japanese-born player to win a league home run title. After the 2023 season, Ohtani signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers, the largest contract in professional sports history. Unable to pitch in 2024 while recovering from a second elbow injury, Ohtani played as designated hitter for the Dodgers and became the first player in MLB history to record 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a season.

Internationally, Ohtani represents Japan. At the 2023 World Baseball Classic, he won the MVP Award for the tournament following Japan’s victory over the United States. The 2023 final was one of the most-watched baseball games in history, culminating with Ohtani striking out Angels teammate and USA captain Mike Trout on a full count, securing a 3–2 win and Japan’s third title.

Shohei Ohtani was born to Kayoko and Toru Ohtani in Mizusawa (now part of Ōshū), Iwate, Japan, on July 5, 1994. His mother Kayoko was a national-level badminton player in high school and his father Tōru (徹) worked at a local automobile manufacturing plant and was an amateur baseball player who played in the Japanese Industrial League.

Ohtani is the youngest of three children. He has one older sister, Yuka, and one older brother, Ryuta (龍太), who is also an amateur baseball player in the Japanese Industrial League. In Japan, Ohtani was known as a “yakyū shōnen” (野球少年; “baseball boy”)—a kid who lives, eats and breathes baseball. Coached by his father, he displayed an aptitude for the game at an early age. He began playing baseball in his second year of elementary school, and as a seventh-grader, Ohtani recorded all but one of 18 outs in a six-inning regional championship game.

Ohtani has been nicknamed “Shotime”.

Since gaining national and international attention as a high school phenom, Ohtani is one of Japan’s most celebrated athletes and has faced intense media scrutiny with the Japanese press his whole adult life. Due to the high-profile nature of his two-way efforts, the Fighters protected Ohtani from some of the media onslaught, while Ohtani tended to keep to the team dormitory and the gym, leading a semi-monastic, baseball-centric existence, a byproduct of holding down two jobs in the big leagues and doing both at an elite level.

Ohtani has a Kooikerhondje dog named Dekopin. The dog is also known as Decoy, and has received an honorary visa from the Embassy of the United States, Tokyo.

Ohtani is married to former professional basketball player Mamiko Tanaka. Ohtani announced in February 2024 that he had married but declined to disclose his wife’s identity except to say, “She’s a normal Japanese woman”. The next month, he revealed her identity by posting a photograph of himself with Tanaka.

While not fluent, Ohtani speaks passable English as well as Spanish, but prefers to speak to the media through an interpreter who translates from his native Japanese to English, and vice versa. Ippei Mizuhara was Ohtani’s personal interpreter with the Angels and Dodgers, having known Ohtani since he was 18, starting in 2013 during Ohtani’s days with the Fighters. Mizuhara’s role went beyond solely translating to include confidant, conditioning coach, and throwing partner.

In March 2024, an ESPN investigation uncovered $4.5 million in wire payments from Ohtani’s bank account to a Southern California bookmaking operation under federal investigation. On the evening of March 19, Mizuhara told ESPN that the money was for repaying his gambling debts. He said he had asked Ohtani for the money and that Ohtani himself transferred the funds to the bookie. Mizuhara also told this story to the Dodgers clubhouse after a game that day. However, as ESPN prepared to air the interview on the morning of March 20, Ohtani’s law firm issued a statement reading, “We discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities.” That afternoon, the Dodgers fired Mizuhara, who had signed a contract with the team when Ohtani joined. Will Ireton, who had served as an interpreter for Kenta Maeda, took over as Ohtani’s interpreter. At a March 25 press conference, Ohtani made his first public statement about the incident, telling reporters that he had never bet on sports or had any knowledge of the debt until the team meeting on March 19.

On April 11, the US Attorney charged Mizuhara with one count of bank fraud after an investigation determined that he had impersonated Ohtani with his bank, had illegally changed settings on the bank account and had stolen over $16 million from that account. On June 4, Ohtani was officially cleared of any wrongdoing in the affair.

On May 9, 2024, Lionsgate Television announced the development of a scripted series based on the interpreter gambling scandal.

Ohtani is a 6-foot-4-inch (1.93 m), 210-pound (95 kg) right-handed starting pitcher. With an overhand delivery, he throws a four-seam fastball averaging 97 miles per hour (156 km/h) topping out at 102.5 mph (165 km/h), an 86–93-mile-per-hour (138–150 km/h) forkball/split-finger fastball with late diving action, an occasional curveball, and a solid slider at 85–91 miles per hour (137–146 km/h). He posted a walks per nine innings rate of 3.3 across his NPB career. Ohtani has been compared to Justin Verlander by some MLB scouts because of his ability and affinity for throwing harder in high-leverage spots, as well as later in games. Whereas most pitchers throw only a little harder in big spots than they do in normal ones and most pitchers lose speed as the game goes on, Ohtani, like Verlander, is able to reserve power and staying power in order to conserve energy without throwing max effort on every offering.

Ohtani is a left-handed batter. He is a designated hitter and often considered a power hitter capable of leading the league in home runs. Ohtani also demonstrates elite baserunner skills, with a sprint speed and feet-first sliding technique allowing him to have been a league leader in stolen bases, bunt hits and infield-hit rate. Scouts have timed Ohtani running from the batter’s box to first base in as little as 3.8 seconds. For the 2021 season, his 28.8 feet per second (19.6 mph) sprint speed ranked in the 92nd percentile of all players, as did his 3.51 second 80-foot split and he also recorded the fastest home to first average sprint time in the Majors at 4.09 seconds, while recording a then career-high 26 stolen bases.

As a teenager, Ohtani could have played baseball for any powerhouse high school team in big cities such as Osaka or Yokohama. Instead, he opted to stay local, selecting Hanamaki Higashi High School in Iwate Prefecture, Northern Japan, the same high school as pitcher Yusei Kikuchi, whom he admired; Ohtani competed there as a swimmer and played baseball. Ohtani’s high school baseball coach, Hiroshi Sasaki, said that he was a fast swimmer who could have competed in the Olympics.

Under Sasaki’s guidance, Hanamaki Higashi’s players lived on campus, returning home for only six days a year. Sasaki would assign toilet cleaning chores to Ohtani, to teach him humility. In 2012, Ohtani threw a 160 km/h (99 mph) fastball as an 18-year-old high school pitcher, which at the time, had set a Japanese high school baseball record until it was surpassed by Rōki Sasaki’s 163 km/h (101 mph) fastball in 2018. Ohtani threw the pitch in the Japanese national high school baseball championship tournament, commonly called Summer Koshien. In the 2012 18U Baseball World Championship, Ohtani had an 0–1 win–loss record with 16 strikeouts, eight walks, five hits, five runs, and a 4.35 earned run average (ERA) in 10+1⁄3 innings pitched.

Ohtani expressed a desire to move directly to the major leagues after high school and received interest from numerous teams including the Texas Rangers, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers. On October 21, 2012, he announced that he would pursue a career in Major League Baseball rather than turn professional in Japan. The Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters decided to draft him in the 2012 NPB Draft nevertheless, despite knowing that there was a high likelihood he would not play for them. After an exclusive negotiating window between him and the Fighters, Ohtani announced that he would sign with the Fighters and spend some years in Japan before a possible MLB move. Hokkaido said it would allow Ohtani to serve as a pitcher and position player; the Los Angeles Dodgers, who had become Ohtani’s top-choice MLB team, were not prepared to let him play both ways. He was assigned the jersey number 11, previously worn by Yu Darvish.
-For online earning methods visit Earn Money

Ohtani was selected to Japan’s Under-18 National Team that eventually finished in sixth place at the 2012 U-18 Baseball World Cup in Seoul.

In the inaugural WBSC Premier12 tournament, Ohtani earned a bronze medal with the Japanese national team. He was the ace of Japan’s pitching staff, which also featured Kenta Maeda. As the number one starter, Ohtani made two pitching appearances for Samurai Japan, both against Japan’s arch-rival South Korea, winning Game 1 of the opening round and getting a no-decision in the semifinals. Ohtani was subsequently named to the 2015 World Baseball Softball Confederation All-World Team and was named the 2015 WBSC Baseball Player of the Year.

Ohtani was on the 28-man roster for the Japan National Baseball Team of the 2017 World Baseball Classic, but was forced to withdraw due to an ankle injury.

Ohtani played for the Japan National Baseball Team in the 2023 World Baseball Classic. He was named the Pool B MVP for his hitting and pitching performances in the group stage of the tournament. He earned the save in the championship game after pitching the final inning of Japan’s win over the US in the final, striking out his Los Angeles Angels teammate Mike Trout with a 3-2 slider to seal Japan’s WBC championship, and won the tournament’s MVP award after batting .435/.606/.739 as a hitter and posting a 1.86 ERA and 11 strikeouts in 9 2⁄3 innings as a pitcher.

After helping Team Japan clinch its third WBC title, Ohtani became the only player to be named to the All-WBC team at two separate positions, having been named to the 2023 team as both a designated hitter and a pitcher.