By Steve Sailer
07/10/2021
Earlier: Why Hasn’t Any Other Ballplayer Done What Shohei Ohtani Is Doing? and He’s Doing It Again
Shohei Ohtani cannot and will not be stopped.
467 feet. 116 MPH off the bat. https://t.co/hqj0kwpCGE
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) July 10, 2021
This was only the 6th time since the Seattle ballpark opened in the 1990s that anybody had hit a ball into the upper deck.
These kinds of feats of strength are not new for Ohtani. For example, back in Japan he once hit a ball through the Tokyo Dome to the puzzlement of all:
The Angels pitcher/slugger Shohei Ohtani leads major league baseball sluggers with 33 homers and is on pace to exceed Babe Ruth’s 1927 Yankee’s benchmark of 60 homers, and is also 4-1 as a starting pitcher, the best combined hitting and pitching performance since Babe Ruth in 1918-19. Japanese athletes have difficulty triumphing in the west, although Naomi Osaki and Hideki Matsuyama have recently broken through to country club sports major championships.
But Ohtani is doing something long seen as undoable in the American National Pastime.
In 2008 in Beijing, the Olympic torch was lit by 7.5-foot tall NBA star Yao Ming and 3-foot tall Hero Boy, the little kid who dug so many of his classmates out of the giant Chinese earthquake shortly before the Olympics.
Granted, Shohei Ohtani hasn’t dug anybody out of earthquake rubble (yet).
It would take about 4 missed games for Ohtani to fly to Tokyo and back. But it’s not like the California Angels are likely to contend for a postseason spot, even though they will have an awesome 2-3-4 lineup once Mike Trout finally comes back from injury in a few weeks. The Angels have been well above .500 since Trout has been injured due to Ohtani (and old Jared Walsh) but they are 4.5 games out of fifth place in the American League.
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