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The Field of Dreams is in Colorado this week | Vince Bzdek

By Vince Bzdek vince.bzdek@gazette.com July 10, 2021 | updated 4 years ago

It’s Shotime, Colorado.

Growing up in Japan, Shohei Ohtani, aka Shotime, reportedly read comic books about Goro Shigeno, a fictional Japanese boy who hit and pitched baseballs and grew up to play for a pro baseball team in a mythical place called Anaheim in a mythical country called America.

And now Ohtani has made that very American dream come true.

It’s All-Star week in Colorado, and Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels in Anaheim is the star of stars. He will be crowned in Denver this Monday and Tuesday as the most astonishing baseball player of our lifetimes. Right now he is hitting more homeruns than anyone and also pitching fireballs at more than 100 mph. Some people are comparing him to Babe Ruth. Some are saying he’s better.

Back in 2018, Rockies manager Bud Black told our columnist Woody Paige, “He’s doing something that we haven’t seen in this generation.”

Or any other generation for almost for 100 years, Woody observed.

He is the first player ever to be selected as an All-Star hitter and pitcher.

Before Ohtani, only one player had ever had a season with at least 15 homers and 10 games started as a pitcher. That was Babe Ruth in 1919.

Ohtani is the first player, including Ruth, to do what he’s done this year, which is hit 33 homers and start at least 15 games as pitcher, and he’s done it before the All-Star break.

He once hit a homerun straight through the roof at the Tokyo Dome.

Oh, he can steal bases better than anybody else, too.

Here’s the funny thing about Ohtani.

A lot of people bemoan the dying of the American dream in our country. Many of us world-weary Americans are nostalgic for a time when there supposedly was more social mobility, when all of America shared that burning belief that anyone anywhere, regardless of where they were born or who their parents were, could go from rags to riches with enough talent and desire.

For millions of people outside our country such as Ohtani, however, that American dream is still very much alive, and America is still a great global beacon of opportunity.

Ohtani could have stayed in Japan and become the greatest player ever in his country, playing out his career with the Nippon-Ham Fighters.

But this kid from Japan believed in the possibilities of America more than a lot of Americans. He was already headed toward greatness in Japan, but he came to America to reach for something even greater. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m growing weary of all the deconstruction of America these days. I’m done with the tearing down, the fault finding and finger pointing, and I’m ready to join up with all those who want to rebuild and reinvent and renew the belief in the American idea. Ask Ohtani – it’s still a pretty good idea.

Baseball, I think, with its pastoral fields, its booming homerun blasts, and the way it makes megastars of rough-and-tumble kids from the most unlikely precincts, captures that idea like nothing else.

“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. … It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again,” James Earl Jones said to us in “Field of Dreams,” the movie based on the great novel “Shoeless Joe” by W.P. Kinsella.

A lot of people think baseball is a fading sport, eclipsed by football and basketball and even video games. Baseball helped knit the country together in the early 20th century, like those red stitches on the horsehide, essayist Ted Anthony once observed. Then football became America’s sport during the Cold War, the martial beat of those years brought satisfyingly, thrillingly to the gridiron every Sunday. Some say the 21st century — with its emphasis on selfies and star power and endless innovation and improvisation — is basketball’s time in the sun.

And yet, baseball persists. So, too, America persists.

When I would get cynical about my country as a teenager, my dad would say to me that, yes, America had the worst form of government on the planet.

Except for all the others.

I’m thinking when the Great Ohtani looks up out of Coors Field onto those purple mountain majesties tomorrow, and unleashes dozens of dingers into the stratosphere, I’m thinking he’ll be agreeing with that idea of my dad’s.

I’m thinking he’ll be living The Dream. 

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Vince Bzdek vince.bzdek@gazette.com

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