Sports Player Review: Shohei Ohtani - baseball- Angels
- May 1, 2018
- 3 min read
Shohei Ohtani, a baseball player born in Japan 1994, now plays for Los Angeles Angels in Major League Baseball. He is an outfielder, an incisive pitcher as well as a destructive batter.
During senior high school, he had displayed his fastest speed ball to 147 km/h (91 mile/h), which implied that he had the abilities to break the limits of over 150 km/h (93 mile/h). As it turned out, he had created the fastest record in the history of Japanese high school baseball league: 160 km/h (100 mile/h). That's incredibly fast especially for a high school player to reach this professional level of speed. For that reason, in 2012, he was in the first priority chosen by the Hokkaido Nippon-ham Fighters in the Japanese Major League Draft. At first, he wasn't willing to accept the contract made by the team due to the fact that he had aspirations toward Major League Baseball (MLB) in U.S. However, he adopted the agreement eventually as the Hokkaido team offered him the best treatment any player had been treated, the highest value of contract/ the same back number as the former ace pitcher Darvish as well as being a two-way player in the seasonal tournaments.
In March 2013, he had his first appearance in his career in the opening game of the season as an outfielder, and contributed two hits and one RBI(Run Batted In) as well. Then in May, he was arranged as the lineup pitcher, first time in his career. In June, he seized his first win in his profession. Surprisingly, he broke the record of the fastest speed ball in NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) later on, 162 km/h (100.1 mile/h). Delivering the goods, he broke through his limits and continued to produce fascinating records of speed ball in the year of 2016 with the speed of 163 km/h (101 mile/h) and 165 km/h (103 mile/h).
Thanks to his astonishing capabilities in baseball, he was selected by the team Los Angeles Angels in MLB with the contract of 2.315 million US dollars.
During the warm-up matches, he played pretty awful and horrible, which brought about that's of people's doubt toward his strength. Clayton Kershaw said that he was not suitable for MLB, and it didn't worth for LAA (Los Angeles Angels) to provide considerable benefits for him. Others like Justin Turner thought that the involvement was a waste of time due to the fact that he had already chosen the Angels as his first priority. Therefore, it was meaningless to have a meeting with him.
However, all those criticizes did not defeat his confidence and will to challenge himself to come to a stop where he could be a vigorous batter as well as an influential pitcher. Also, the team did not give up on him. Instead, they kept providing chances for him to emerge as one of the crucial figures in the team.
As expected in the first game of him being the hitter versed the Athletics, he had his first hit in his career in MLB. Not for long, he gained his first win as well, 6 strike outs/ 6 innings of pitching/ 3 earned run. Surprisingly, he started to display his actual strength in the substantial games. He hit three homers in the three matches with Cleveland Indians successively. In the following weeks, Shohei Ohtani hit a homer from Corey Kluber who obtained CY Young Award before.
In addition, he had changed his ready posture for hitting. Instead of lifting up his right leg highly like what he did in Japan, his coach taught him to just twist his leg to have more time on observing the ball clearly.
In conclusion, I am really looking forward to Shohei Otani's future career in MLB because of his talented skills and abilities just like Babe Ruth. I wish that he could be successfully become as good as his teammates like Albert Pujols and Mike Trout.
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