A nation turns its lonely eyes to Shohei Ohtani

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Make me smarter …

Truth or dingers?

There’s a message underlying most U.S. history curriculum in American public schools.

Myths about cherry-tree chopping and the Confederacy’s Lost Cause were endemic in my early education, but they didn’t hold once we moved on to chapter books. Later classes might have pushed the notions that a democratic republic is the greatest form of government ever found on the face of the Earth, and that capitalism is by far the fairest economic system ever devised, but that never rose to the level of a unifying theme. But throughout the bite-sized stories of uprisings, revolts, wars, Depressions and booms, American schoolchildren are left with one key takeaway from K-12: it’s fun to root for a winner.

From the Pilgrims and the founding fathers on through the doughboys and the civil rights movement, the story of America is sold as a narrative of endless progress and success. European histories, with their extended timelines and frequent setbacks, seem dour in comparison to the streamlined story of us. We were underdogs once — but never again, and we’re taught to boast to older nations about our sudden, fevered ascent like so many drunken Bostonians listing the stats of Tom Brady. (It’s not surprising that Brady’s team was literally called the Patriots.)

This rah-rah boosterism can be difficult to unlearn. Liberal and left-leaning Americans might have left their uncomplicated views of the country’s history behind after some well-meaning teacher or uncle slipped them some Howard Zinn, but the impulse to look for a good guy is baked in. As the World Series begins today, might we suggest Shohei Ohtani?

You don’t need to believe the stories about Union Army Gen. Abner Doubleday or be a Ken Burns-style baseball romantic to find something inspiring and quintessentially American in Ohtani’s story. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher and designated hitter is an immigrant who toiled with a bunch of sadsacks on the California coast (that would be the Angels, the Dodgers’ chronically inept crosstown rivals) before the largesse of a hyper-capitalist consortium freed him, with the help of some number-fudging, to reach his fullest potential. Surrounded by the type of winners that only cold hard cash can buy, he’s proven to be a once-in-a-century athlete whose presence on the mound and at the plate is equally terrifying.

Ohtani’s freakish penchant for making batters and pitchers alike look silly via strikeouts and moonshots regularly draws a line back to the period Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.” Baseball obsessives’ love of stat-keeping runs headlong into Ohtani’s one-of-one talents, pulling ancient names like Tungsten Arm O’Doyle (invented) and Kenesaw Mountain Landis (real guy!) out of the history books as we strain for any comparison.

Ohtani lifted the Dodgers into the World Series by playing, arguably, the greatest game of baseball delivered by any one player in the game’s history. On the mound against the overmatched Milwaukee Brewers, he pitched six scoreless innings and struck out 10 batters. At the plate, he went a perfect 3-for-3, with all three hits being solo home runs. It’s the sort of game that the Babe Ruths and Joe DiMaggios of the world could only dream about. It’s a Barry Bonds statline appended to a Nolan Ryan one. It’s the sort of triple-triple roll that would upend J. Henry Waugh’s life. And it really happened in the United States in 2025.

You might not root for the Dodgers in your regular life. Hell, you might not even watch baseball. But only one team in the upcoming World Series is representing an American city, and they have a guy who can pull off a game like that at any time. Trump’s running troops in the streets. The economy is in thrall to a series of lying Mechanical Turks. It’s unlikely that your guys or gals won their last election. Let yourself cheer for a living myth who can knock a baseball into Nevada. It feels good, right?

What do you think? Is the World Series a good enough reason to feel briefly patriotic under Trump 2.0? Can you root (root, root) for Ohtani, even if it means cheering for the spendy Dodgers? Sound off in the comments.

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