The Odyssey of Ohtani

We have a special guest writer today, Dori, who is not only the chief administrator keeping the 120 Proof machines running, she also inexplicably married Todd

I Went to Japan and All I Got Was This Transcendent Shohei Ohtani Season

Tokyo, 2025. I’m halfway through a vending-machine peach soda, staring at a Lawson’s sandwich that somehow tastes like nostalgia, when my phone lights up - the Dodgers have advanced to the World Series, riding the broad shoulders of Shohei Ohtani, the man who made baseball feel impossible again.

There’s something poetic about watching this from Japan — as if I’ve come to the source code. The birthplace of the player who doesn’t just play baseball; he rewrote it.

The country hums with quiet pride — polite, reverent, unbothered. Replays on every television in every electronics store.

Meanwhile, back in L.A., Dodger fans are losing their collective minds like we’ve just discovered a new sport. I swear I heard the screams of joy all the way across the Pacific.

I grew up with Dodger Blue — Garvey, Lopes, Cey, Baker. The golden boys of the ’70s, when every game felt like a summer movie you didn’t want to end. I drifted in and out — adulthood, cynicism, the tax-return vibe of modern baseball analytics — until the 2010s lured me back with Kemp and Ethier. One night I caught myself checking launch angle instead of holding my breath.  That’s when I knew something sacred had slipped.

Baseball only felt alive again in flashes.

Then Shohei arrived.

And alive suddenly seemed like an understatement. He pitches like Zeus cosplaying as Sandy Koufax. He hits like Babe Ruth with access to Japanese precision engineering. He runs like gravity negotiated a separate contract.

Every time he steps onto the field, he reminds you how small the rest of us are, and every time he swings, the ball leaves not just the park — it leaves the genre.  He’s the first athlete who feels less like a player and more like a global event.

And yet, he smiles like your barista. That’s the glitch — the humility. The total lack of arrogance in a man who could, at any moment, make every pitcher in the league rethink their career choices.

Let’s take a quick moment for Anaheim.

The Angels. The franchise that looked at the best player of this or any known dimension and said, “What if we surrounded him with a cast of tax write-offs and vibes?” They had the Mona Lisa and hung her in a strip mall next to a Jollibee. Then they wondered why no one came to the gallery.

But back to the light.

Because Ohtani doesn’t just play for the Dodgers now — he restored them. He made the Dodgers mythic again.

Because when a man hits three home runs and strikes out ten in the same game — in October, no less — you stop calling it baseball and start calling it mythology. It wasn’t a win; it was a story too big for the box score. Even my phone notifications looked like destiny in shorthand:

“Ohtani: 3 HR, 10 K.”

I stared at that line the way you stare at something you know will outlive you. It felt like the Iliad being rewritten in Dodger Blue – a Hollywood myth for a city that has always preferred its heroes live action.

That was the moment I was all in again. Forget the analytics, forget the cynicism — I was back, part of the beautiful madness that comes with believing in a team that finally feels like itself again.

You can feel it in the crowd — that electric hum of people who’ve waited since childhood for something worth losing their minds over.

And from halfway across the world, jet-lagged and snack-drunk in Tokyo, I felt it too. That spark. That reminder that baseball, for all its numbers and nonsense, can still be magic. Baseball used to be about stats; Ohtani made it about awe. He’s not just the best player alive — he’s the reason we’ll all spend the rest of our lives comparing everyone else to him.

And yeah, I’ll say it: maybe I didn’t need to come to Japan to find Shohei. But if you’re going to witness something like this, you might as well do it from the place that built the blueprint.

Now pass me another peach soda — The World Series is waiting.

Dori / 120 Proof

Jaded, caffeinated and emotionally unavailable to any team below .500.