WHAT A GREAT TIME TO BE ALIVE:

In the summer of 1889, Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki brought baseball to his hometown. He started with a ball, a bat and a few friends. It had been 17 years since the American professor Horace Wilson began teaching the sport to students in Tokyo. Shiki was a college student, a member of the first generation of Japanese ballplayers. He soon became famous for something else: reviving the old poetry tradition of haiku.

In simple terms, Shiki was an iconoclast, a critic, an ambitious writer who pulled from Western influences, challenged convention, pushed limits and reinvented haiku in the process. He was also a baseball player, one who loved to pitch and play catcher, who became so obsessed with the sport that he began to write poetry about it. Today he is considered one of Japan's four great haiku masters. He's also in the Japanese baseball hall of fame. He elevated two art forms by thrusting them forward.

Before Shiki died at age 34, he devoted much of his energy into examining the first haiku master, Matsuo Bashō, a 17th-century poet recognized as Japan's greatest. Like many Japanese writers, Shiki read Bashō's masterpiece, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North," a travelogue of his journey into the remote wilderness of northeast Japan in the late 1600s. It's a legendary piece of Japanese literature, a work that later inspired the Beat Generation. Bashō traveled on foot. The trip took five months. Along the way, he ventured to the town of Hiraizumi, in what is now Iwate Prefecture, still a rural area in the north.

If you travel to Iwate today, you will find statues of Bashō, tributes to his journey and inscriptions of his haikus. But if you stay a while, you will also find baseball.

It's where Shohei Ohtani grew up.

On April 26, Shohei Ohtani did something that no one had done in a century: He stepped on a pitcher's mound and started a game for the Angels while leading the American League in homers. Ohtani was the first to accomplish this since Babe Ruth, who pulled it off for the last time on June 13, 1921, but as always with Ohtani, the fine print was more fascinating than the headline. The day before, on April 25, he put a baseball into orbit in Houston, launching a 440-foot homer at Minute Maid Park. The day before that, he homered while making his first cameo in left field. And the day after his start, he was back in the lineup at designated hitter.

But on the day he started? That was light work. He collected two hits, drove in two runs, scored three times, lasted five innings on the mound, struck out out nine and earned the win, which made him the first pitcher in either league to have two hits, three runs and nine strikeouts since Luis Tiant in 1961. "A pretty complete game of baseball," Angels manager Joe Maddon said, a statement which was both technically correct and underscored the difficulty of capturing the Ohtani experience with words.

One hundred and forty years after Horace Wilson brought baseball to Japan, 131 years after Masaoka Shiki crafted his first poetic tribute, and a hundred years (give or take) after Ruth cemented the game as America's pastime, Ohtani, a 26-year-old from Iwate Prefecture, is threatening to break the sport, to push the limits of what was thought possible, to redefine our conception of a baseball star. This is at once obvious to the baseball layman and also hard to fully grip. Ohtani is 6 feet 4, and he looks as if his bodily proportions were designed for blueprints in a baseball laboratory. His frame could fit in a Terminator movie. He throws 101 mph and he hits 470-foot homers, sometimes on the same night. And after three seasons in America, after Tommy John surgery and a pandemic slowed his ascent, he is finally showing the skill set that made him the most tantalizing baseball prospect on earth.

If he is not the most valuable player in the sport, he is no doubt the most gifted. If he were just a hitter or just a pitcher, he would still be an All-Star candidate and a hero in his home country. But he is both, a composite sketch of the sport's great players, a borrower of styles, a surrealist's idea of a baseball player, a starting pitcher with a 2.58 ERA in 11 starts and a designated hitter with 28 homers and an OPS+ north of 170. He is a cartoon character out of Japanese anime. He is the big kid from Little League. He is ruthlessly efficient with his body, at once mechanically sound and graceful, wielding a bat as if Bryce Harper grew up worshiping the elegance of Ichiro Suzuki.

[W]hen they worked out Ohtani -- who selected the Angels over the Mariners, Dodgers, Giants, Rangers, Padres and Cubs the previous December -- for the first time at the Ham Fighters' spring complex in Okinawa, his score, particularly in the vertical jump portion of testing, was average at best.

A month later, in Tempe, Ohtani ran through the same battery of tests. His vertical jump had increased by nine inches to become one of the highest in the organization. Eppler was blown away. It was not until Ohtani revealed to Li what happened that it all made sense.

Up until that January workout in Okinawa, Ohtani had never done a vertical jump test in his life. So when his results came back mediocre, the hyper-competitive Ohtani spent the next month watching YouTube videos and practicing on his own to develop the proper technique. He learned how to properly load his hips so as to not spring off of one leg and ruin the efficiency of his jump. He studied how to use his static starting position to generate force from the ground, maximizing his ability to jump up, and not forward.

So the 6-foot-4 Ohtani, who already had a fastball that could top 100 mph and the power to crush baseballs more than 500 feet while also proving to be fleet of foot, added the ability to jump.

"It's unique to see somebody be able to adapt (like that) and then even more so for an athlete is the ability to apply it," Eppler said when recounting the tale for the umpteenth time.

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