Shohei Ohtani, the “Japanese Babe Ruth,” made his Major League debut Thursday for the Los Angeles Angels against the Oakland Athletics, the American Yakult Swallows. Ohtani went 1 for 5 as the designated hitter, batting 8th in the 6-5 loss to my favorite team on Opening Day.
Ohtani was the most talked-about player in the off-season. MLB announced his eligibility to play for an American team in November; he signed with Los Angeles two weeks later, and speculation about how the Angels would or should use him has been non-stop ever since.
Ohtani is a unicorn in the Majors: the first player expected to see regular action as both a pitcher and hitter since Babe Ruth in the 1930s. As a pitcher, he holds the Nippon Professional Baseball record for the fastest pitch ever thrown (102.5 MPH). As a hitter, he hit a respectable .286 over five seasons with 48 home runs.
He had a less-than-impressive spring training at the plate and on the mound, leading many to suggest that the Angels were hurrying him along, at least in their expectation to use him as both a pitcher and a hitter.
While Ohtani was in the Opening Day lineup as a DH, he didn’t bat Friday against the left-handed Oakland starter Sean Manaea (Ohtani throws right-handed but hits left-handed), and he’s not in the lineup for today’s game, since he’s scheduled to pitch Sunday.
At least for now, this seems to be the Angels’ plan. Ohtani is fourth in the pitching rotation and will be eased into his role as a hitter, most likely as a DH but not on days before he pitches, and perhaps with limited action against left-handed pitchers. Slotting him eighth in the batting order further decreases the pressure to become acclimated to American pitching.
However, pressure will undoubtedly be a constant all season as the Japanese media gives him the Ichiro Suzuki treatment. Most American fans won’t be watching quite as attentively, but until he explodes into stardom or fizzles as a disapointment, he’ll remain one of 2018’s big stories in the Majors.
Sunday’s game against Oakland is at 1:05 p.m. at the Oakland Coliseum.
Boy am I late with this review. Jennifer Zhang’s new EP Escape Emotion was released August 29 last year, and I’m finally getting to it now.
Electronic drumbeats seem determined to turn two nice dream-poppy songs into dance tracks, and they feel like slightly lazy DJ mixes. The beats are bland and uninteresting except in a few moments where they’re stripped back and give the keys and vocals the room they deserve. Once track 3, “Knell,” gets going, the beats make the song better, not quite in the spacy way of the best tracks from that third album by The xx, but pretty reminiscent of them.
Synopsis: Honey needs time away from home to relax and get ready for the baby, so Jessica tricks her into going north to Maine (instead of south to the Keys) in pursuit of a book jacket blurb from Stephen King for A Case of a Knife to the Brain. Louis orders a new sign for Louis Huang’s Cattleman’s Ranch (disappointing me and surely countless others by not naming it Louis Huang’s Kenny Rogers’s Michael Bolton’s Cattleman’s Ranch). Grandma plans to move out, so Emery wants her room, leaving Evan alone in the room they once shared. Eddie and Nicole rebel against the school dance’s policy requiring boys to wear pants and girls to wear skirts.
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps: The Jessica-Honey story is too long and only interesting because you spend the whole time looking for Misery references. I Googled the name of the diner (Downy’s Diner) and hospital (Penobscot Memorial Hospital) thinking they might be King references, but alas. I think some kind of spoof on King horror stories might have been more interesting. Unless this story is a spoof and it just flew over my head, in which case I apologize.
