In 2025, Ohtani turned baseball into cinema, delivering a season of historic power, poise, and two-way mastery the sport still can’t fully quantify.
Editor’s note: This piece is part of “The 50 Names in the Boardroom,” our December Cover Story spotlighting the athletes, creators, and leaders who defined the year, selected through the same filter we use daily to shape what matters to the BOARDROOM.
The thing about Shohei Ohtani is that he doesn’t compete with other players; he competes with history. Every season feels like a crazy sequel to an already impossible story, and somehow, he keeps getting a bigger budget. In 2025, the mythology hit its apex. Fifty-five home runs. A 1.014 OPS. Six shutout innings and three bombs in one playoff game that made even the most coldhearted haters stop pretending to be unimpressed. He didn’t just play baseball this year; he redefined it.
The Dodgers already looked like Hollywood, but Ohtani made them cinematic. You could see it in the way he walked to the plate like a man in control of both the moment and the myth. The cameras love him because he plays with a director’s eye for framing. The fact that he still switches from pitching to hitting with the ease of someone changing instruments makes the whole thing feel like jazz performed at the highest level.
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In an era obsessed with specialization, Ohtani is a reminder that mastery doesn’t have to be narrow. He’s a disruptor, a startup founder in cleats, breaking the code on a century-old industry. Baseball didn’t know how to market him at first because it had no precedent. The sport that built its legacy on statistics suddenly had to reckon with something that couldn’t be quantified.
Awe is what Ohtani trades in now. Every swing, every strikeout feels like an act of dominance. He feels inevitable. Much like his fellow LA denizen LeBron, he’s an embodiment of Jay-Z’s famous “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man” bar. Ohtani is both — the franchise and the player.
What separates him from the legends is that his control feels quiet. No theatrics, no performance of ego, just endless results. He plays like someone who already knows how history will remember him. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe legacy isn’t built in moments; maybe it’s built in repetition.
In the post-game interviews, he never oversells it. He barely breaks a sweat. There’s something almost eerie about his calm, as if he knows he’s living inside his own folklore. The rest of us are just catching up.
Ohtani is what happens when mastery stops apologizing for its ambition. When the love of the craft becomes so total, it transcends translation. He’s not just baseball’s greatest living experiment — he’s its final evolution.
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The List: 50 Names in the Boardroom
The List: 50 Names In The Boardroom
