Shohei Ohtani, once talked about as being unmarketable, crossed the line from MLB star to “transcendental” athlete, landing in spaces not often occupied by baseball players, much less athletes from Japan.
Ohtani announced he has signed an eye-popping $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, ending one of the most publicized baseball free agent courtships in decades.
And in the process, he became the face of a sport that has been fading into a regional interest for years and was in desperate need of a 21st century jolt.
There’s no doubt that Ohtani is now the sport’s most recognizable name, said Stan Thangaraj, the director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College in Massachusetts.
“The fact we’ve had someone become the face of MLB is an incredible move forward for the Asian and the Asian America community,” said Thangaraj, an authority on the impact of sports on Asian Americans and the author of “Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity.”
When word of Ohtani’s agreement with the Dodgers broke Saturday afternoon, online searches for his name immediately spiked, dominating the virtual world for hours.
And even in the following days, U.S. searches for Ohtani remained as high as those for topics as varied as the NBA’s in-season tournament, the Israel-Hamas war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I’ve thought more about baseball in the past 48 hours than I have in the past 48 months” because of Ohtani’s signing, said Marcus Collins, who teaches marketing at the University of Michigan. “I mean, when is the last time people have talked about baseball to this fidelity?”
Ohtani could hold the key to selling MLB to overseas markets.
“Shohei Ohtani has become the most well-known international figure for American baseball and for the MLB,” Thangaraj said. “It is absolutely the case that there’s this desire for an exceptional baseball player who has such a global…
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