The best thing to do: Sit back and watch the Sho

The brilliance of Shohei Ohtani continues to play out for us in real time, even as he’s moved up from Anaheim to Dodger Stadium. More than that, his brilliance continues to be almost routine now, in his seventh season playing in this country, moving up on his 30th birthday in July. And he isn’t even going to be pitching this season. Imagine what this would all be like, for the Dodgers and baseball, if he were.

Ohtani signed that huge contract, the biggest in American sports history, for $700 million over 10 years. He has managed to navigate, just since Opening Day in South Korea, a gambling scandal involving a trusted former translator. Through it all, he has hit. He has been as advertised. He has been Ohtani, perhaps that remains the best way to describe it.

Memorial Day Weekend is always one of the first big checkpoints of the baseball season. As he and the Dodgers enter it, he is every bit the star the Dodgers expected him to be.

Juan Soto, who was the second biggest news of the offseason when he was traded from the Padres to the Yankees, is having a season as a hitter with the Yankees remarkably similar to the one Ohtani is having with the Dodgers, with the Yankees in first place in New York the same way the Dodgers are in first place in L.A.

And suddenly, Aaron Judge is hitting home runs the way he did when he hit 62 in ’22, and he's having a month of May that has reminded us all what it was like when he became the sport’s biggest star two years ago -- in the season when he hit more home runs than any American League hitter ever had, all the way back to Babe Ruth.

But then there is Ohtani: Batting .354 after a relatively quiet 1-for-4 night for him against the Diamondbacks on Wednesday, with 13 homers, 34 RBIs, a .646 slugging percentage and an OPS of 1.068, while stealing 13 bases so far this season in the No. 2 slot in manager Dave Roberts’ batting order between Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. Inevitably this season, if he is blessed with good health -- maybe even around his birthday when he gets home run hot again -- he will hit his 200th homer.

He won’t pitch for the Dodgers until next season, when he will resume being the kind of two-way phenomenon that Ruth was in Boston as a kid. Brian Cashman, the Yankees' general manager, once again referred to Soto this week as a “generational” talent, as the subject of the Yanks signing Soto before he becomes a free agent at season’s end was put into play by both Cashman and Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner. And Soto, still just 25, is all of that.

Ohtani remains different, though. What he’s done so far since arriving in this country with the Angels in 2018, pitching and hitting, hasn’t happened in more than a century. And guess what? It might never happen, at least not at this level, ever again. He’s already won two MVP Awards and might very well win another this season.

The other day, in front of another 50,000-plus crowd at Dodger Stadium, Ohtani even produced his first walk-off hit in years, a line drive into the right-field corner in the bottom of the 10th that scored Jason Heyward and gave the Dodgers a 3-2 win over the Reds.

“We always say he’s the best player in the world, and you see it,” Dodgers outfielder Andy Pages said when that game was over.

Ohtani, of course, was predictably himself.

“I was just looking to put the ball into play,” he said through an interpreter. “So I’m glad that it worked out well.”

The one who’s working out well for the Dodgers, and at the stage he’s gotten at Dodger Stadium, and for baseball, is Ohtani. It was Shohei Ohtani Day in Los Angeles last Friday, and he was honored at City Hall, and responded by hitting a home run that night. The night they gave away Ohtani bobblehead dolls saw the biggest crowd in the Majors this season, and the biggest crowd at Dodger Stadium in nearly five years. Somehow, it’s as if everything is new with Ohtani all over again, even in a season when he won’t throw a pitch -- and not just because he’s gone from Angels red to Dodger Blue.

And there is one other element to this move: The first-place Dodgers have recovered from a slow start and are winning again. They are on track to win another National League West title and contend for the World Series again, and maybe win their first since 2020, which means that all this time after showing up here from Japan, Ohtani will finally get to take a big swing at the postseason.

The fall in baseball will take care of itself, the way it always does. For now, the best thing to do is sit back and watch the rollout of the latest Shohei show, this one in the capital of show business. And we need to remind ourselves that it isn’t even summer yet. He might be just getting started.