Book excerpt: The story behind Major League Baseball’s two-way playing phenomenon and his rise from early days in Japan to his historic 2021 MVP season. Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels is playing baseball like no other major leaguer since Babe Ruth. His dominance as a two-way player—an electric pitcher and an elite slugger—made him the 2021 American League Most Valuable Player, the only player ever selected as an All Star as both a pitcher and hitter, and a member of Time 100’s most influential people of 2021. In Ohtani’s first two-way game of the 2021 season, he threw a pitch at 100 mph and hit a homer that left his bat at 115 mph, a confluence of feats unmatched by anyone else in the sport. He racked up eye-popping achievements all year. But awards and numbers tell only part of his amazing story. In Sho-Time, award-winning sportswriter Jeff Fletcher, who has covered Ohtani more than any other American journalist, charts Ohtani’s path through Japanese baseball to a championship with the Nippon-Ham Fighters, the recruiting war to bring him to the majors, his 2018 AL Rookie of the Year campaign, subsequent injury-riddled seasons, and then his historic 2021 season. Along the way, Fletcher weaves in the history of two-way players—including Babe Ruth and unsung Negro Leagues players like “Bullet” Joe Rogan, Martín Dihigo, and Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe—and the Japanese athletes who preceded Ohtani in the majors. With insight from Japanese and American baseball front office personnel, managers, scouts, athletic trainers, ballplayers, and more, Sho-Time breaks down the physics of Ohtani’s game, his technologically advanced training, his international fame, and the role he and teammate Mike Trout are playing to lead baseball into the next generation. Praise for Sho-Time “Jeff Fletcher masterfully chronicles not only what Ohtani accomplished in ‘21, but also provides the full context to his achievements. . . . Fletcher’s book is the definitive look at Ohtani’s two-way majesty.” —Ken Rosenthal, Senior Writer at The Athletic “Historians will be talking about Shohei Ohtani’s 2021 season for decades, and thankfully the baseball gods arranged for Jeff Fletcher to be there to cover baseball’s best two-way player ever in the midst of a pandemic, to bear witness and mine details and write with grace about the sport’s most incredible individual performance.” —Buster Olney, ESPN “The essential portrait of baseball’s most captivating player. . . . Fletcher goes beyond the carefully scripted press conferences, revealing in vivid detail the challenges and triumphs of a baseball journey like no other.” —Tyler Kepner, The New York Times