It’s not a yoga topic, but I would like to talk about a baseball player. This may seem completely unrelated to yoga, but my yoga master who is also a Japanese yogi is a big fan of his, and I am a huge fan of his, too. And I worship him. What is it about him that attracts us? Shohei Otani is simply good looking and cool. He is tall and well-proportioned, capable of throwing a 100 mph fastball and hitting home runs, and he is a great human being. Men can aspire to be good-looking and cool at any age. After all, we don’t want to be uncool.
When I was a child, I used to long to be a baseball player. Nowadays, soccer is just as popular in Japan, but I think baseball was the most popular sport when I was a kid. I wanted to be a baseball player like many children dreamed of. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with the talent, and like many other children, I had to give up. Although I loved watching baseball, I had been away from Japan for a long time, and baseball itself was almost nonexistent in my mind. Maybe seven or eight years ago, I ran into my master again by chance at an ashram in Rishikesh, India. He is a genuine free spirit who has no contacts, etc. We often talked about yoga and meditation, and for some reason He often talked about Shohei Otani. I knew his name somehow, but did not know much about him. My yoga master is a great admirer of Shohei Ohtani. That was very impressive for me. And I wondered why.
I started watching him play in 2018, after Shohei Ohtani moved to MLB. The main reason he is getting so much attention is because he is taking on the challenge of playing both pitching and hitting, something that is said to be impossible in modern baseball. He won the Rookie of the Year title in his first year, despite an elbow injury. In his second year, due to surgery for the elbow injury he sustained in the first year, he did not pitch and concentrated only on hitting. The results were so-so. In the third year, his season was shortened due to Covid, and he was unable to pitch or hit well. In his fourth year, I think he and everyone around him knew that this was his last chance to play 2 way role as a pitcher and a hitter. As it turned out, he had an incredible season. He marked numbers that no one could have predicted. After he debuted as a pro, there were always pros and cons to the two way approach, however he silenced the people with the great stats, who doubted him, and even turned them into praise. In his fifth year, there was an expectation that his results would be slightly lower because the previous year had been too good, but they were so much better than the previous year’s results.
His elite level of success in pitching and hitting is astounding, but more astounding is his mental strength. In Japan and in the MLB, every time he gets injured or has a slump, he is accused of not being able to play both side. Because he continues to challenge something that has almost no precedent and is even said to be impossible, haters take the opportunity to bash Shohei Ohtani. Who else can stand that? His strength is unimaginable.
One MLB player said that Shohei Ohtani is ‘Mythical god disguised as an MLB player’, and I really think it’s true. He is definitely a once in a lifetime player and He probably is a holy man.
