Los Angeles rarely unites around a collective obsession; the city is too large and diffuse for conversation to center on a single topic. But there are occasional exceptions, such as 1) if it’s raining and 2) Shohei Ohtani.
On Thursday afternoon, the day of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ home opener at Dodger Stadium, it was not raining, so Ohtani, the team’s biggest star and the world’s greatest baseball player, had the conversation to himself. Not that he participates in it: Ohtani is so private that his rare public disclosures, no matter how anodyne, generate frenzies of interest. In November, when he accepted his second M.V.P award, he revealed that he had a dog, a Nederlandse kooikerhondje named Dekopin, or Decoy, for short. The dog dominated baseball discussion for days. A few months later, in an Instagram post, Ohtani revealed he had married. Nobody had ever even seen him with a girlfriend. The announcement was accompanied by a picture of Decoy, and Ohtani later described his bride, whom he did not name, as a “normal Japanese woman.” This turned out to be an understatement: she is Mamiko Tanaka, a former professional basketball player in Japan, and videos were soon circulating of her sinking three-pointers, accompanied by jokes that the couple would produce the Kwisatz Haderach, the messiah generated by the careful mixing of bloodlines in “Dune.”
Since moving from Japan to play in the U.S., in 2017, Ohtani has been a mildly tragic figure, because his godlike talents—he is not only the game’s best hitter but possibly the best pitcher, too—were wasted on his first team, the Los Angeles Angels, who, in all that time, never made it to the playoffs. In Ohtani’s last year with the Angels, when it seemed they might finally contend, he got injured, in August. (He won’t pitch again until 2025, on account of the injury, though he can still bat.) Then he went dark, and fans obsessed about where he might go next. One day in December, they learned that the Dodgers had won him over with the promise of seven hundred million dollars, practically double the value of baseball’s next-largest contract. Most of the payout, strangely, was deferred, ostensibly so that the Dodgers could shell out for even more talent. Cue days of Ohtani discussion.
These were the sorts of preoccupations that captivated his fans in the weeks before Ohtani’s first game at home as a Dodger: the slogan for his endorsement deal with New Balance (“In that run, every soul delights”); the mural of him that was going up in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo; a Sports Illustrated article about the mattress he travels with and his commitment to sleeping ten hours a night, plus a nap. Then, between the first and second games of the season, which this year were held in Seoul, news broke that the Dodgers had fired Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, for placing bets with an illegal bookmaker in Orange County. In one of the more poorly managed public-relations crises in recent history, Mizuhara gave a ninety-minute interview to ESPN, claiming that Ohtani had lent him money to pay off his bookie, though Mizuhara said that Ohtani didn’t know who the money was going to. The next day, Ohtani’s lawyers claimed instead that Mizuhara had stolen the money—at least four and a half million dollars. M.L.B. announced an investigation.
The scandal would have been big news on its own, but mystery and pathos made it even bigger. Mizuhara had not merely been Ohtani’s interpreter; he had seemed to be, prior to the arrival of Tanaka, Ohtani’s only companion. He met Ohtani in 2013, when he was hired by the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, where Ohtani was an eighteen-year-old rookie. Had Mizuhara duped his friend? There was speculation online that Ohtani himself could have been involved in the gambling—though this was a minority position, since it was not clear to people that Ohtani even paid attention to other sports, let alone enough to bet on them. (At a brief press conference on Monday, Ohtani said that he had never bet on sports nor asked anyone to do so for him.)
In L.A., the scandal only heightened the Ohtanimania, becoming a subject of drive-time radio and conversations with friends. The home opener was, of course, sold out, and the four months between Ohtani’s signing and the arrival of the season had given Dodgers fans time to buy new clothes to show their allegiance to the star. It was an afternoon game, with a start time just after 1 P.M., and the temperature on the scoreboard read a refreshing sixty-five degrees. Attendees wore Ohtani Dodgers jerseys with his name in English or in Japanese, and some had his jersey from last year’s World Baseball Classic championships, in which Ohtani had led Japan to victory. One fan wore a T-shirt showing Ohtani as a Jedi, another wore one with Ohtani’s name over the red sun of the Japanese flag.
The Dodgers’ management have been open about their plan to use Ohtani and another recent and expensive Japanese acquisition, the young pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, to convert a generation of Japanese people to Dodgers fandom. The game had the feeling of a Pacific Rim summit. There were at least as many Japanese reporters as American ones in the press box; at concession stands, you could buy octopus takoyaki, chicken-katsu sandwiches, and sake. I spoke with a young family who had travelled from Tokyo for the game. One of them was dressed entirely in Dodgers gear, including a jacket emblazoned with Hideo Nomo, a Japanese star for the Dodgers in the nineteen-nineties. I asked whether he’d been a Dodgers fan for a long time. “Oh, no,” he said, laughing. “I was an Angels fan.” He was here for Ohtani. He had just spent fifteen hundred dollars on souvenirs for family and friends.
The cost of concessions was on people’s minds, since fans have been wondering how the Dodgers will try to recoup the billion-plus dollars they have spent on their players this past off-season. “They’re going to charge us fifty dollars for a beer,” one said, ruefully. He was wearing an Ohtani T-shirt that his girlfriend had given him for Christmas, and told me that, on the day the Dodgers had signed Ohtani, his “whole house went haywire.” I asked him what he meant by “haywire.” “Running back and forth and screaming,” he said. The stadium organist played a few bars of the theme from “Twin Peaks.”
All the fans I spoke to believed in Ohtani’s innocence. “I’m a licensed therapist and I feel like his nonverbal cues and his affect in the interview were cloaked in fear,” a Dodgers fan named Arlene told me before the game began, referring to his press conference earlier that week. Arlene and her husband wore matching T-shirts that said “SHOHEI OHTANI” in sparkling chrome lettering and had images of Ohtani batting in profile, gazing with piercing focus into the distance, and reacting to striking out a player. Her nails were painted a shade called “Rock n Blue.” She added, “I think the people that say, ‘Well, I don’t believe him’—I think those people are jaded, on the West and the East Coasts.”
In the upper deck, longtime season-ticket holders greeted each other after a long off-season apart. A man, leaning against the balcony at the back of the stadium, a sweeping vista of hills behind him, stood dressed entirely in Dodger blue, including a large blue sombrero adorned with silver ornaments and Dodger-championship pins that glittered in the sunshine. His name was Gilbert Romero. He told me that he had been coming to Dodgers games since 1964 and hadn’t missed a home game in twenty years. “Thanks to God, I never get sick,” he said. He was unruffled by the gambling scandal, though he expressed to me moral outrage about having once seen Fernando Valenzuela, the great Dodgers pitcher from Mexico, in the parking lot charging people money for autographs and photos. Romero liked it when big stars came from abroad, because the park always took on some of the atmosphere of the players’ home countries. As he spoke, a man wearing a blue suit and a velvety fedora, who said he hadn’t missed a season opener since 1988, sidled up to Romero to say hi.
Romero introduced me to friends, who had all spent years and even decades sitting next to one another at games. The top deck was relaxed and breezy, like Dodgers nirvana. Listening to them talk, it soon became clear that the man referred to casually on Dodgers podcasts as Ippei was now an outcast and a villain. It had recently come to light that Mizuhara had not graduated from the college he’d claimed to have attended. “Just lies,” a middle-school teacher and season-ticket holder named Lorena Ramos told me. Ramos wore a Clayton Kershaw jersey over an Ohtani T-shirt.
Even a couple of Cardinals fans, who were checking a box on a tour to see their team play in every baseball stadium, conceded they thought Ohtani was innocent. They were expecting a loss. “We have a lot of injured players right now,” one of the Cardinals fans, Julie Wiskirchen, said. She also told me she posts a haiku on Twitter after every game. I asked what they thought of Dodger Stadium. Her friend, Mike Brigante, shrugged. In St. Louis, opening day “was like a city holiday,” Wiskirchen said. “They bring out the Clydesdales.”
Soon, Josh Groban sang the national anthem. Adrián Beltré, a former Dodger who was recently inducted into the Hall of Fame, threw the first pitch to Clayton Kershaw. After the Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow made quick work of the Cardinals in the top of the first, Mookie Betts led off for L.A. against the Cardinals’ thirty-five-year-old pitcher Miles Mikolas. Betts, previously a star center fielder, had recently been moved to shortstop, a change that, in a normal year, might have dominated discussion. He drew a walk.
Then Ohtani stepped up to the plate, making what seemed to be a bow in the direction of the umpire. Fifty thousand people let out their appreciation. Ohtani, a left-handed hitter, is six feet four and moves with uncommon grace. He holds his bat high in a manner that seems both balletic and warlike. He fouled off a couple of pitches, then hit the ball cleanly to right field. He rounded first, then second, and continued toward third—but Betts had been held there by the third-base coach and was gesturing to Ohtani to go back. The Cardinals’ outfielders had finally got the ball to the infield, and Ohtani was tagged out on his way back to second. It was a weird and slightly confusing fumble, but it didn’t matter. The Dodgers scored twice in the inning, getting all the runs they needed—the Cardinals would only score once, on a home run by Paul Goldschmidt, a thirty-six-year-old first baseman, in the fourth—though they’d later add five more. Ohtani drew a walk his next time up, and scored on a home run by Freddie Freeman. He hit a single in the fifth and struck out in the seventh.
In the clubhouse afterward, at least, all seemed loose and normal. Up close, Ohtani resembles both a giant and a young child. Reporters flocked to him and his new interpreter, who has already been the subject of a profile in the Los Angeles Times. Ohtani gave an innocuous interview, lamenting that he was “the only guy who couldn’t hit a homer.” (He was referring to his fellow-M.V.P.s, Freeman and Betts, who also hit one). Later, the Dodgers’ manager, Dave Roberts, waved off a question from a reporter who asked him how it felt to be playing “checkbook baseball.”
After we all went home, I checked Wiskirchen’s feed for her Cardinals haiku:
