How Shohei Ohtani Made Baseball Fun Again

When I’d asked Shohei how he might be different if he’d come to the U.S. five years earlier than he did, he focused on the baseball outcome: He might not even have made it in the majors. But I also meant emotionally. Maturity-wise. How different would he be?

“Honestly, even now, I feel like I haven’t really changed much since I was 18. There wasn’t a huge difference in those five years”—living in the dorms in Japan, just playing ball.

That is: when that pure engagement with the game could be preserved by living simply and single-mindedly. Then, as now. An apartment. A ballpark. A Tesla. Some takeout.

As we glide up to the dock, he thanks Balelo for the boat tour, and says “Nice ride!” in English. When I suggest that he could get one for himself, he looks incredulous. “Too much expensive,” he says.

Before we go, I ask him to describe for me, in his own words, what a yakyu shonen is.

“Yakyu shonen is a kid who loves baseball,” he says. “Who’s just purely enjoying baseball. When I was a yakyu shonen, I probably had the most fun playing up to this day, because I was just starting to learn a new sport, and it was just fun—generally fun. And all the practices were usually on the weekend, so I was waiting all week for the weekend to hurry up and come so I could practice and play some ball.”

I ask if yakyu shonen could be used to describe someone at the professional level too. Someone who, say, plays with unadulterated joy. Who smiles—and even occasionally apologizes to his opponent—when he does something incredible. Who treats every game like it’s the weekend after a long week of school.

“I mean, it literally means ‘baseball boy,’ ” he says, smiling. “But, sure, I guess you could refer to a professional that way too.”

Daniel Riley is a GQ correspondent.

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2022 issue with the title “Game Changer.”

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