Angels are handling Ohtani with great care
ANAHEIM, CALIF. — Aware that words had failed him, Mike Scioscia, the manager of the Los Angeles Angels, gave a couple of quick grunts to the dozen or so Japanese reporters who congregated around him last weekend in the dugout at Anaheim Stadium.
Scioscia was trying to more graphically convey that Shohei Ohtani, the Japanese pitching and hitting sensation, would be throwing a full gorilla bullpen the next day.
“Full gorilla?” asked Grace McNamee, the team’s Japanese media liaison, who interprets interviews with English-speaking players and coaches for the crush of Japanese news media that has been following the Angels since the start of spring training.
“OK, let me explain, because I don’t want anything lost in translation,” Scioscia said. “That’s a term we use in the United States to mean you go as hard as you can throwing 100 per cent. We call it ‘full gorilla.’ What do they call it in Japan?”
“Probably a normal bullpen,” an American reporter said, drawing laughter all around.
Scioscia, undeterred, carried on his bullpen-splaining.
“We have stages,” he said. “We have ‘full gorilla,’ ‘touch and feel’ and ‘just get on the bump.’ So there’s varying degrees of what a pitcher will do depending on what he’s trying to accomplish. Do we have an understanding?”
“So tomorrow’s a full gorilla bullpen?” McNamee said.
“Yes,” the manager concurred. Then Scioscia had a question. Wondering how this might play out in Japanese newspapers the next day, he said, “Are we going to have a big picture of a gorilla and Ohtani?”
King Kong imagery aside, the arrival of the baby-faced Ohtani, who can belt tape-measure home runs and fire 100 m.p.h. fastballs, has thrust this sleepy franchise into the national (and international) spotlight in a way that even Mike Trout, widely considered the best player in baseball, and Albert Pujols, who is closing in on 3,000 career hits, have not been able to do.
Ohtani’s assimilation has been — like Scioscia’s recent exchange — entertaining, uncertain and full of contortions, linguistic and otherwise, as the Angels go to extraordinary lengths to accommodate his desire to become the major leagues’ first two-way star since Babe Ruth a century ago.
They have, in fact, given Ohtani the full gorilla treatment.
The Angels will soon begin using a six-man pitching rotation that will require shuttling starters back and forth from the minor leagues so that Ohtani can take the mound once a week, as pitchers do in Japan. Although Ohtani is one of the team’s best hitters — he batted cleanup last Sunday — he does not go to the plate on the days he pitches, or on the days just before and after, so he can get mental and physical breaks.
The Angels adhere to this regimen so tightly that in their loss to Houston on Wednesday, Scioscia declined to use Ohtani as a pinchhitter for Luis Valbuena in the seventh inning, even though a home run would have tied the score. (Valbuena flied out against Justin Verlander, against whom he is 3 for 33 in his career, and the Angels did not bring the tying run to the plate for the rest of the game.)
And though he is one of the team’s best athletes, at six-footfour and 200 pounds, Ohtani will not play in the outfield this season. This has meant that Pujols, 38, an immobile slugger, has often ceded the designated hitter role and played first base, where he has already appeared in twice as many games as he did all of last season.
Ohtani has done little to temper interest.
Entering Friday’s game, the left-handed hitting Ohtani was batting .333 with three home runs and 11 runs batted in. On the mound, where he throws righthanded, he is 2-1 with a 4.43 ERA, and in one stretch he retired 33 of 34 hitters. He struck out Jose Altuve, the reigning American League Most Valuable Player, twice Tuesday night, when his fastball reached 101 m.p.h..
Still, if Ohtani ultimately proves to be little more than a middling pitcher and a run-ofthe-mill hitter, will all these accommodations have been worthwhile?
“I’m not really sure how to answer that because it’s hypothetical,” Angels general manager Billy Eppler said. “We’re just trying to stay present and deal with our circumstances because this game is going to have so much ebb and flow, and throw things at you.”
The Angels devised their program for Ohtani by going through his game logs from Japan, examining pitch counts, days between starts and “everything under the sun,” said Eppler. Then the Angels sent a contingent to Japan to meet with people from Ohtani’s former team, the Nippon-Ham Fighters, and further flesh out how to manage him.
“Everything is basically the same,” Ohtani said, speaking through an interpreter. “The same amount of practice swings, similar rhythms.”
The Angels’ sports science and training staffs monitor exertion levels from games and workouts, as well as eating, hydration and sleep for all players, but their attention to Ohtani will be particularly acute.
If there is any chafing in the clubhouse over accommodations the Angels have made for Ohtani, it surely helps that he has arrived with few trappings.
Unlike Daisuke Matsuzaka, who rankled his teammates in Boston when he showed up with an entourage in 2007, or Masahiro Tanaka, who arrived in New York with a pop star wife, Ohtani came only with an interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, who had worked with English-speaking players for the Fighters.
Ohtani lives in an apartment not far from Anaheim Stadium and is chauffeured by Mizuhara in a Hyundai sedan.
It is in keeping with his lifestyle in Japan, where he lived in a dormitory during his five seasons as a professional. “It’s almost a modern style of a monk,” said Anri Uechi, a reporter who covers Tanaka and the Yankees for Kyodo News. “There’s an idea that baseball is a ritual way of living, like martial arts — a way to live through baseball.”
Ohtani’s teammates have little trouble understanding the depth of his devotion. If he had waited two more years to come to the United States, Ohtani, 23, stood to reap hundreds of millions of dollars. The last Japanese star player to make the jump, Tanaka, received a seven-year, $155-million contract before the 2014 season.
But Ohtani, because he is not yet 25, cost a relative pittance under the collective bargaining agreement — a $20-million fee that went to the Fighters, a $2.3-million signing bonus and a minor-league contract that ties him to the Angels for six years.
Ohtani will earn the major league minimum, $545,000, this season, which makes him the lowest-paid player on the Angels’ roster.
“That says a lot about him,” Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs said. “He wants to show us that the money isn’t the reason he’s here. He just wants to play baseball.”