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Baseball is a worldwide game, and it's the people that play it that make it that way.
Ohtani's success can be defined by the season that he is having so far. As both a pitcher and a designated hitter, Shohei is doing something that hasn't been done since Babe Ruth's playing days. Ohtani is currently leading the entire MLB in home runs with 45 at the moment.
Ohtani is having a near-unprecedented season. As both a pitcher and a designated hitter, Ohtani has excelled. He has put up numbers of 45 home runs, 95 runs batted in, and 130 hits in the batters box. While on the pitchers mound, Ohtani has a 9-2 win-loss record, a 3.28 earned run average, along with 146 strikeouts. There have been some fans debating if Ohtani is currently having the greatest individual baseball season of all time.
International players help grow the game of baseball around the world. Players throughout history such as Fernando Valenzuela, Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, and now Shohei Ohtani have helped grow the game of baseball worldwide.
In recent years, many fans have pondered where the game of baseball was heading. Popularity and interest in the game was heading into decline. The 2020 World Series brought in the lowest television viewership in the history of the broadcast with 9 million viewers per game. A slightly big difference from recent World Series broadcasts that put up numbers of 22 million, 18 million, and 17 million viewers per game. While the MLB saw a 2 percent increase in viewership from last years 60-game shortened season, it was still down 12 percent from the last full 162-game season in 2019.
Shohei Ohtani's success has certainly been nothing short of great for the game of baseball. Young stars such as him, Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., and Fernando Tatis, Jr. have shown that baseball is going to be in great hands for years to come.
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