This post is part of a media project called SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage. Pick a number, and consider the list of athletes attached to it. Who wore it best? Or, what’s the most compelling story linked to it? Any person, place or thing is in play with Southern California connections. Star power, transformational achievement, longevity, notoriety and quirkiness all factor in. Whatever leads to a lively discussion and interpretation.
The most obvious choices for No. 17:
Shohei Ohtani: Los Angeles Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers
Bill Kilmer: UCLA football
Phillip Rivers: Los Angeles Chargers
The not-so-obvious choices for No. 17:
Puka Nacua: Los Angeles Rams
Carl Erskine: Los Angeles Dodgers
Jari Kurri: Los Angeles Kings and Mighty Ducks of Anaheim
Jeremy Lin: Los Angeles Lakers
The most interesting story for No. 17:
Shohei Ohtani: Los Angeles Angels pitcher/designated hitter/outfielder (2018 to 2023); Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher/designated hitter (2024 to present)
Southern California map pinpoints:
Anaheim, Los Angeles (Dodger Stadium)
Reference books on the subject:
“Sho-Time: The Inside Story of Shohei Ohtani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played,” by Jeff Fletcher, 2022
“L.A. Story: Shohei Ohtani, The Los Angeles Dodgers, and a Season for the Ages,” by Bill Plunkett, 2025
Everything, everywhere all at once, Shohei Ohtani’s ability to be a Major League Baseball hitter and pitcher has become the ying and the yang of a supernatural existence wearing the uniforms of Southern California’s two franchises since 2018.
To best capture what this has been like, there is an English-created adjective you don’t find in any global dictionary or with a Japanese-translatable character. Yet.
In a June 2025 Substack post, former MLB player-turned-media analyst Doug Glanville seized on what he felt was a true measurement of the seismic things worth documenting for future generations:
“I landed on ‘Ohtanic’ … ‘When Shohei Ohtani does something that only Shohei Ohtani can do.’ ” Glanville explained. “Circular? Yes. True? Also yes. … He exists in this strange stasis. Maybe like the Last Action Hero or Batman — super, but without superpowers. Ohtani does not need smoke and mirrors. He is right there, in the open. And that is the point. …
“He embodies a kind of limitless greatness, rooted in craft, powered by discipline, and entirely human. And still, that does not quite capture the essence of who he is and what he does.”
Glanville came up with this word nearly four years after Ohtani made the AL All-Star team as a member of the Los Angeles Angels. He was named both as a hitter and pitcher. He batted leadoff as the DH and started on the mound, credited with the victory in the final box score. But that’s a mere exhibition.
“Ohtanic” came nine months after Ohtani had a game in Miami for the Los Angeles Dodgers that resulted in him going 6-for-6 with three homers, 10 RBIs and two stolen bases, he reached the 50 HR mark as well as the 50 SB mark for the season. The game also clinched the NL West title for the Dodgers. Had he also pitched in that game, consider the superlatives added in.
Joe Posnanski wrote on Sept. 20, ’24: Did Shohei Ohtani just have the greatest game in baseball history? … Let’s instead call it the most amazing game in baseball history. Let’s instead call Ohtani the most amazing player in baseball history. All the great players in baseball history, Ruth and Mays and Aaron and Bonds and Gehrig and Clemente and Pujols and Bench and Ichiro and Charleston and Mantle and Morgan and Griffey and Gibson and Trout and on and on… and we’ve never seen anyone like Shohei Ohtani.
Then, on Oct. 16, 2025, during Game 4 of the National League Championship Series at Dodger Stadium, this happened:
Add to that Ohtani, as the starting pitcher, went into the seventh inning and 100 pitches (66 strikes) before coming out. He was credited with throwing six shutout innings and striking out 10 Milwaukee Brewers hitters. As the DH — effectively, hitting for himself — Ohtani rocked solo homers in the first, fourth and seventh innings, off three different pitchers. The last one went over the right-field pavilion roof and was listed at 469 feet, one of the greatest hit in the stadium’s history. It wasn’t even the longest he ever hit.
Sportswriters, historians and pop culture hyperbolic hyperbolists may have essentially squeezed all available digital thesaurus in landing on his status of “The Unicorn” or “GOAT of MLB history.” Still, we’re circling back to “Ohtanic.”
Like Titanic, only a larger disaster if it ever submerges into the depths of our memories as something too good to believe.
The Washington Post’s Chelea James wrote of that playoff performance: “This was Beethoven at a piano. This was Shakespeare with a quill. This was Michael Jordan in the Finals. This was Tiger Woods in Sunday red. This was too good to be true with no reason to doubt it. This is the beginning of every baseball conversation and the end of every debate: Shohei Ohtani is the best baseball player who has ever played the game … Friday night, (he) was Mona Lisa.”
Jayson Stark, writing for The Athletic/The New York Times under the headline “Ohtani, the Greatest Shoh on Earth, just had the greatest game in baseball history” declared: “A man named Ohtani had the single greatest game any human has ever had on a baseball field … assuming that term,’human,’ even describes him.” New Yorker writer Louisa Thomas checked in with: “It was the greatest performance by the greatest player in history.”
To punctuate if further, Peter Wehner wrote in the Atlantic under “A Truly Awesome Performance: “Ohtani’s performance shouldn’t be of interest just to sports fans. His triumph offers all of us a ray of hope at a troubled time. … Enjoy Shohei Ohtani while you can. He embodies athletic excellence, which will bring you joy, and moral excellence, which will bring you hope. We could benefit from some of both these days.”
That was written just months after ICE raids in Los Angeles, including the Little Tokyo area of DTLW, brought to light photos such as this:
If Ohtani came perhaps at the right time in our existence, in one stream of thought, there was another idea more philosophically obtuse that Michael Weinreb reflected on with his “Throwbacks: A Newsletter About Sports History and Culture,” under the headlined: “Ohtani Is a Hero for the AI Age“:
“I began to wonder if Ohtani’s performance will wind up meaning much of anything at all outside of baseball itself. And I wondered if — through no real fault of his own — Shohei Ohtani could wind up becoming the avatar of an empty cultural age. … He is everything and he is nothing. And you might argue, in an era where everyday life in America feels increasingly detached from reality, he is the quintessential hero of our age.”
That seemed to almost morph into a fictional (?) story that appeared in the Onion days earlier headlined: “Teammates Unnerved As Interpreter Begins Referring To Ohtani As ‘The Host’,” suggesting Ohtani was taking on demi-god status.
Breath deep and meditate on more iterations of adulation:
Above is an excerpt of the New York Times’ list of the “67 Most Stylish People of 2025,” for the way he turned “a hand gesture originally featured in a Japanese cosmetics commercial into something of a craze” as he ran around the bases after a homer.
In January of 2026, he was declared the world’s most marketable athlete based on making about $100 million in revenue just from endorsements. Then he became a childen’s author for the fun of it.
Where do we find a true origin story amidst all the Ohtani gaga?
Christmas came early for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2023, and the cross-town Los Angeles Angels were left with nothing more than a lump of coal. If only it was something more like Gerrit Cole if they could have pried him away from the New York Yankees in a deadline trade that would have sent Ohtani to the Big Apple for a different kind of curtain call.
Not only did Ohtani come gift-wrapped courtesy of the Angels, but it took the Dodgers a creative way to set up a 10-year, $700 million deal with much of it craftily deferred so it wouldn’t prevent them from building a heftier team around him. He most expensive gesture and pivotal moment in Southern California professional baseball created the most distinct example of the big business intersection of sports and entertainment.
That’s just no-sham, no-shame, global Sho-business.
In the past, a welcome-to-L.A./SoCal gala fetted for the likes of Wayne Gretzky, LeBron James, Shaquille O’Neal, or David Beckham had their own fanfare. But Ohtani was just changing addresses that involved a carpool lane on the SoCal freeway. He put in six seasons in Orange County. Now it was time for DTLA. There was no need for re-introductions, but the Dodgers did so anyway at a press conference set specifically in the afternoon at Dodger Stadium on Dec. 14, 2023 so that it was prime morning viewing in Japan the next day.
A 2017 piece on CBS’ “60 Minutes” explained to all U.S. viewers what was happening in Japan when Ohtani was 22 and trying to figure out his next move.
Earlier, Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times went to Japan as well to write about how “Japanese baseball star Shohei Ohtani could be double threat in big leagues.” The story started: “SAPPORO, Japan — The best player on the baseball team pitches and bats fourth. Not on a Little League team. Not on a high school team. On a professional team that plays at this country’s highest level. Shohei Ohtani has the kind of extraordinary talent that could change the sport. He’s done it here, and he soon could do it in the major leagues, all the while maintaining the innocence of a boy playing a kids’ game despite the scrutiny and pressure he faces as Japan’s most-popular athlete.”
When he showed up at Dodger Stadium a week before Christmas, Ohtani said through then-interpreter Ippei Mizuhara: “I am very humbled and happy to see all of you guys here … I was told that it was only media today, so I was not expecting this.”
Dodgers broadcaster Joe Davis interjected: “It actually is only media.”
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