Yesterday, after Angels batting practice, a six-year-old kid asked Shohei Ohtani for his bat. Ohtani did what most players would do in that situation: he laughed, signed some autographs, but held on to his bat and then left.
But then a few minutes later he came back to where the kid was and handed him a bat. An official Shohei Ohtani model, with his name on it in Kanji. Ohtani later told an MLB.com reporter, through his interpreter, “Hopefully he can swing with that and become a good player one day, but I can’t be doing this all the time. I’ll run out of bats.”
Here’s the request:
Ohtani had at least one more bat in his bag, of course, and he used it to DH in last night’s game against the Royals. In the seventh inning the Angels broke the game wide open, thanks in part to Ohtani’s bases-clearing triple:
The season is 14-games old, yet Ohtani’s legend is already substantial and continues to grow.
