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The trick to understanding Shohei Ohtani in Anaheim is this: Angel Stadium was not just where he played. It was where the sport had to keep adjusting its eyes.
He arrived in December 2017, coming from the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in Japan and choosing the Los Angeles Angels. From 2018 through 2023, that ballpark in Anaheim became home base for an experiment that sounded almost old-fashioned in its ambition: one player, fully committed to being both a hitter and a pitcher.
The first season announced the scale of it. Ohtani won the American League Rookie of the Year Award for 2018, with Mike Scioscia managing the club and Mike Trout alongside him as a teammate. Then came the reminder that talent does not spare a body. After that rookie year, Ohtani underwent Tommy John surgery and did not pitch in 2019.
That might have turned the story into a cautionary tale. Instead, it became a test of whether the two-way dream would hold. Through changes in leadership — Joe Maddon, then Phil Nevin in the dugout, Perry Minasian in the front office, Arte Moreno as owner throughout — Ohtani kept pushing the idea forward.
By 2021, the sport had stopped asking whether this could work and started trying to describe what it was seeing. Ohtani won the American League MVP. He made the All-Star Game in 2021, 2022, and 2023. And in 2021, he was selected as both pitcher and hitter, then started the All-Star Game for the American League on the mound and also batted leadoff. That is the sort of sentence that still sounds like a typo.
The Anaheim years reached their sharpest, strangest clarity in 2023. On July 27, he threw a complete-game one-hitter against the Detroit Tigers in the first game of a doubleheader, then hit two home runs in the second. He later became the first player in major league history with at least 10 pitching wins and 40 home runs in the same season. He won a second American League MVP, this time unanimously.
And yet even this story carried its price. In August 2023, the Angels announced that Ohtani had torn the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow and would not pitch again that season. After the year, he underwent a second elbow procedure, became a free agent, and in December 2023 signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
So yes, Anaheim was six seasons, awards, surgeries, and an eventual goodbye. But more than that, it was the place where baseball watched one player insist on being two — and, for a while, make that seem almost normal.