Shohei Ohtani

#1Shohei Ohtani threw exactly zero pitches for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2024. His right elbow was still recovering from surgery, so one half of baseball's most famous two-way act simply wasn't available.

#2Then September 19 happened.

#3In Miami, Ohtani went 6-for-6. Three home runs. Two stolen bases. Ten RBIs. Two doubles.

#4By the end of that afternoon, he'd crossed 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season. No Major League Baseball player had ever done that before.

#5He finished with 54 homers and 59 steals. He won MVP. And after six seasons with the Los Angeles Angels without a single postseason appearance, he finally got to play in October.

#6The Dodgers went all the way. World Series champions.

#7Which left a pretty obvious question.

#8Why bother pitching again?

#9Ohtani had already needed two major operations on his right elbow. Now he'd proved, on an actual major league field, that he could make history, win MVP, and win a championship without ever stepping onto the mound.

#10Except while all of that was happening, he was still throwing.

#11Still rehabbing.

#12Still trying to become a pitcher again.

#13To understand why, you have to go back to the choice he made at 18.

#14In 2012, Ohtani was one of the most intriguing high school players in Japan. He could throw 160 kilometers per hour—about 99 miles per hour—and he already knew where he wanted to go after graduation.

#15America.

#16He wanted to skip Nippon Professional Baseball and head straight toward Major League Baseball.

#17Then the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters drafted him with the first pick anyway.

#18Now they had to convince a teenager who had already said he wanted to leave Japan.

#19The Fighters didn't simply tell him to forget about America. They offered another route: develop as a professional in Japan first, then go to MLB.

#20But there was another part of the pitch.

#21Don't choose.

#22Pitch and hit.

#23Ohtani wasn't being talked into something he'd never imagined. He believed he might be good enough to hit professionally too. The chance to keep both possibilities alive appealed to him.

#24Manager Hideki Kuriyama was willing to actually put that idea on a professional baseball field.

#25It didn't look brilliant right away.

#26Ohtani's rookie season in 2013 was messy enough to make the whole experiment look debatable.

#27As a pitcher, he had a 4.23 ERA. As a hitter, he batted .238 with three home runs.

#28The talent was obvious. The proof wasn't.

#29The Fighters kept both jobs anyway.

#30In 2014, the idea started looking more interesting. Ohtani won 11 games on the mound and hit 10 home runs.

#31Then the two sides split apart again.

#32In 2015, he became one of Japan's best pitchers. His batting average fell to .202.

#33This wasn't a neat story where the pitcher and hitter improved together every year. Sometimes one moved forward while the other stalled.

#34The Fighters still didn't cut one loose.

#35Then came 2016.

#36Ohtani hit .322 with 22 home runs. On the mound, his ERA was 1.86.

#37He became the first player selected to Japan's Best Nine as both a pitcher and designated hitter in the same season. He won Pacific League MVP. The Fighters won the Japan Series.

#38The strange plan from 2012 had taken years to really work.

#39Now Ohtani wanted to find out if it could survive the majors.

#40That's where things got painful.

#41Ohtani arrived with the Los Angeles Angels in 2018 and immediately tried both jobs.

#42He hit 22 home runs. He made 10 starts as a pitcher and posted a 3.31 ERA.

#43He won American League Rookie of the Year.

#44And his right elbow was damaged.

#45After the season, Ohtani underwent Tommy John surgery, the ligament-reconstruction operation that can require a long road back to pitching.

#46Hitting could come back sooner. So in 2019, Ohtani played as a designated hitter while working toward a return to the mound.

#47Then his left knee needed surgery too.

#48The plan still hadn't changed. Once his body was ready, he'd pitch and hit again.

#49In 2020, after 693 days away from a major league mound, he finally came back.

#50It could hardly have gone worse.

#51Ohtani faced six hitters in his first start back.

#52He retired none of them.

#53Three walks. Five runs. And his fastball was noticeably slower than it had been during his rookie year.

#54His next start lasted 1⅔ innings.

#55Then his right arm hurt again.

#56A flexor-pronator strain ended his pitching season. His final line for 2020 was almost absurd: 1⅔ innings, seven earned runs.

#57At least he still had the bat.

#58Except that went wrong too.

#59Ohtani hit .190 in 44 games, with seven home runs.

#60For the first time, the question wasn't how great he could become at both jobs.

#61It was whether he should still be doing both at all.

#62Angels manager Joe Maddon acknowledged that another injury could eventually force a conversation about becoming a full-time position player.

#63There was an easy answer sitting right there.

#64Pick one.

#65Ohtani still planned to come back as both.

#66The winter before the 2021 season was different.

#67For the first time since coming to the majors, Ohtani wasn't spending his offseason dominated by recovery from a major operation.

#68He rebuilt his lower body. He worked on his pitching mechanics and his swing. He used outside training and data, and he started getting into game-like pitching and hitting work earlier.

#69The Angels changed too.

#70Protecting Ohtani had often meant rules around when he could hit, especially near his pitching days. Maddon wanted fewer fixed "Shohei Rules."

#71Instead, the team started asking Ohtani what his body was telling him.

#72Was hitting before a start a problem? What about the day after? When did he actually need rest?

#73And Ohtani had to answer honestly. When he thought he needed a day, he said so.

#74This wasn't the Angels deciding he could do whatever he wanted.

#75It was a different kind of control. The team stopped trying to predict every limit in advance, and the player took more responsibility for reporting where those limits actually were.

#76Then 2021 started.

#77In April, Ohtani started a game on the mound and appeared in the batting order.

#78His first time up, he homered.

#79Pitching days no longer meant the hitter had to disappear around them. Ohtani stayed in the rotation while remaining an everyday presence in the Angels lineup.

#80By the end of the season, he'd hit 46 home runs.

#81On the mound: 9-2, with a 3.18 ERA.

#82He won the American League MVP unanimously.

#83It'd be easy to turn that into a simple explanation: remove the restrictions, unlock Ohtani.

#84But that's not what happened.

#85He was finally healthy enough to have a normal offseason. His training changed. His mechanics changed. His physical preparation changed.

#86And the way his team used him changed at the same time.

#87The player and the system around him had both moved.

#88Then Ohtani showed it wasn't a one-season trick.

#89In 2022, he hit 34 home runs while going 15-9 with a 2.33 ERA and 219 strikeouts. He qualified for the leaderboards as both a hitter and a pitcher in the same season.

#90The experiment was turning into a career.

#91And then the manager who'd first let him try it came back into the story.

#92Japan reached the final of the 2023 World Baseball Classic.

#93The manager was Hideki Kuriyama—the same man who had managed Ohtani with the Fighters when an 18-year-old was trying to become a professional pitcher and hitter at the same time.

#94The opponent was the United States.

#95Ohtani started the final as Japan's designated hitter.

#96Japan carried a 3-2 lead into the ninth.

#97Then Ohtani came in to pitch.

#98He got two outs.

#99The last American hitter walked to the plate.

#100Mike Trout.

#101Ohtani's Angels teammate. One of the defining hitters of his generation.

#102The count went full.

#103Ohtani threw a slider.

#104Trout swung through it.

#105Game over.

#106The player Kuriyama had once allowed to build a career around two jobs had just started a world championship game as a hitter and finished it as a pitcher.

#107That would've made a very clean ending.

#108Five months later, Ohtani's elbow failed again.

#109On August 23, 2023, Ohtani started the first game of a doubleheader against the Cincinnati Reds.

#110He left the mound in the second inning.

#111His right UCL was damaged again.

#112His pitching season was over.

#113But there was another game that day.

#114Ohtani came back for the second half of the doubleheader as the designated hitter.

#115The pitcher had stopped.

#116The hitter hadn't.

#117He finished the year batting .304 with 44 home runs. Before the injury, he'd also posted a 3.14 ERA with 167 strikeouts in 132 innings.

#118Another unanimous MVP followed.

#119So did another elbow operation.

#120Once again, one half of Ohtani's career had to shut down.

#121And this time he was about to choose a new team.

#122Ohtani had spent six seasons with the Angels.

#123He'd won Rookie of the Year. He'd won MVP twice.

#124The Angels still never posted a winning record during those six seasons, and Ohtani never played a postseason game for them.

#125In December 2023, he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

#126Ten years. $700 million.

#127Then came the unusual part.

#128Ohtani agreed to defer $680 million of the deal. During the 10 seasons covered by the contract, he'd receive $2 million per year. Most of the money would be paid later.

#129He wasn't giving $680 million away.

#130But the idea for that enormous deferral came from Ohtani's side, and it gave the Dodgers more immediate flexibility to keep building their roster.

#131By then, the goal wasn't just to produce extraordinary individual seasons.

#132He wanted to win too.

#133There was one complication.

#134He couldn't pitch in his first Dodgers season.

#135That's the season when he went 50-50.

#136As a hitter alone in 2024, Ohtani hit 54 home runs and stole 59 bases.

#137MVP.

#138First postseason.

#139World Series champion.

#140If there was ever a moment to decide pitching wasn't worth going back to, this was it.

#141His right elbow had already required two major operations. And now he had real proof that pitching wasn't necessary for him to make baseball history.

#142Still, he kept throwing through the season.

#143A little farther.

#144A little more.

#145Building back toward a major league mound.

#146In June 2025, he got there.

#147It was his first MLB pitching appearance since August 2023.

#148The Dodgers didn't immediately ask him to work like a conventional full-length starter. He began with short outings and gradually added more.

#149All the while, he kept hitting.

#150The pitcher wasn't replacing the hitter. The pitcher was being added back, piece by piece.

#151Ohtani was a two-way player again.

#152Then, in 2026, he had to stop again.

#153The problem wasn't the surgically repaired right elbow.

#154It was his left knee.

#155Persistent irritation eventually interrupted Ohtani's pitching schedule. A planned start was scratched. He skipped the MLB All-Star Game.

#156Pitcher Ohtani stopped again.

#157Hitter Ohtani kept playing.

#158And the pitching door stayed open.

#159He resumed playing catch. He threw bullpen sessions. He progressed to facing hitters.

#160When his body wasn't ready, the return got pushed back.

#161By then, the pattern was hard to miss.

#162Ohtani's two-way career had never really been a story about doing two things without interruption.

#163There had been a lot of interruptions.

#164Back in 2012, the Fighters had offered an 18-year-old Ohtani an unusual possibility.

#165Maybe he didn't have to choose.

#166His career turned out to be more complicated than that sentence.

#167Sometimes he absolutely did have to choose—at least for a while.

#168When his elbow failed, he stopped pitching. When surgery demanded months of rehab, he played only as a hitter. When a comeback went badly, he rebuilt. When his body wasn't ready, starts were delayed.

#169Being a two-way player never meant doing both jobs every day at any cost.

#170What Ohtani kept doing was leaving himself a route back to the other one.

#171Eventually, Major League Baseball started making room for players who could do both. It created an official two-way player designation. The rules were also changed so a starting pitcher who was simultaneously serving as the designated hitter could leave the mound and remain in the game as a hitter—a change widely known as the Ohtani Rule.

#172What had begun as one Japanese team's strange plan for one teenager had become something the major leagues needed rules to accommodate.

#173And in 2024, Ohtani got perhaps the strongest reason he'd ever had to finally choose one.

#174Without pitching, he made history. Without pitching, he won MVP. Without pitching, he won the World Series.

#175Then he picked up a baseball and started working his way back to the mound.

#176Shohei Ohtani's two-way career isn't a story about refusing to ever put one thing down. He's had to put pitching down again and again.

#177The unusual part is simpler than that.

#178For Ohtani, putting something down for a while has never automatically meant giving it up for good.

#179Just weeks into Ohtani's first season with the Dodgers, his longtime interpreter Ippei Mizuhara was suddenly fired. A U.S. federal investigation later found that more than $16 million had been transferred from Ohtani's bank account to an illegal bookmaker, while investigators identified Ohtani as the victim. How could someone who had been so close to Ohtani's life in America move that much money without him knowing?