Coming To America

A NATIONAL SENSATION ON JAPANESE BALLFIELDS, SHOHEI OHTANI - THE PITCHER AND HITTER - IS HEADED TO LOS ANGELES TO SHOW US WHAT THE HYPE IS ALL ABOUT

- Roger Fernandez

Former British prime minister Winston Churchill, baffled by a foreign power, once described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.You get the feeling Major League Baseball’s front office bigwigs get that same vibe from a new foreign power with a big arm, a big stick and big plans.

There are plenty of questions surrounding Japan’s Shohei Ohtani, who signed with the Angels as a free agent on December 8. Is he a pitcher, a hitter, can he play in the field, can he be an everyday player and simultaneously stick in a rotation? Is he truly The Japanese Babe Ruth?

Tap the break on The Babe comparison. “First of all, we don’t call him Babe Ruth,” Kosuke Sasai, a Japanese manager, told The New York Times. “I never heard anyone calling him Babe Ruth.”

Ruthian nickname or not, Ohtani and a new mania has hit American shores, landing straight in Southern California where he’ll pitch and likely see some at-bats as a DH . From what we’ve seen from the budding 23-year old, 6-foot-5 right-hander, he has the stuff, and then some, to jump from the Nippon Professional Baseball League to the Major Leagues.

Ohtani (his agency clarified that it’s Ohtani, not Otani) the pitcher, the one who starred for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, went 10-4 with a sparkling 1.86 ERA and 0.96 WHIP as the Pacific League’s 2016 MVP. And we should mention that he owns a sinker, a slider, a curve and touches triple digits on the radar gun with regularity. He once rocketed a 102.5-mph pitch, and scouts say he’s top-of-the-rotation-ready.