Carelessly Annotated Video: Shohei Ohtani’s Spring Debut

As Baseball America’s Ben Badler has made clear by way of an internet weblog post, 18-year-old Japanese right-hander Shohei Ohtani made his spring-training debut today for the Nippon Ham Fighters, with whom he signed after considering the possibility of moving straight to affiliated baseball following high school.

Embedded above is complete footage of Ohtani’s appearance versus Rakuten. Included below are increasingly less informative annotations for that same video.

0:09 — Ohtani roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air takes the mound.

0:17 — Uniformed Japanese youth clap in unison.

1:56 — Casey McGehee appears before our eyes.

2:00 — Ohtani throws his first pitch at 143 km/h — or, roughly 89 mph.

2:07 — A man celebrates his fortune: a foul ball off the bat of the real Casey McGehee.

2:27 — Ohtani throws his second pitch at 151 km/h — or, roughly 94 mph.

2:44 — Ohtani throws his third pitch, a slider at 138 km/h — or, roughly 86 mph. McGehee swings and misses for strike three.

2:51 — A replay of same.

3:29 — Ohtani’s fourth overall pitch is his first one to outfielder Makoto Moriyama and the fastest of his appearance, at 157 km/h — or, roughly 98 mph.

3:53 — Ohtani’s second pitch to Moriyama, at 156 km/h (ca. 97 mph), is close but called a ball.

4:10 — Moriyama slaps a ground ball out of the third baseman’s reach and into left field.

4:52 — Ohtani throws errantly to first base on a pick-off move.

4:56 — The author notices that colleague Jackie Moore is asking a question via gchat. “Hey,” Moore has written.

5:51 — “Hey you,” the author has written back.

6:21 — Jackie has made some changes to the relief-pitcher positional rankings post on which he and the author are working together — in particular, with regard to the Phillies.

7:29 — “Noted, dude,” the author replies.

7:52 — Ohtani strikes out another batter, looking, on a curveball at 128 km/h — or, about 80 mph.

8:01 — Jackie says the rest of the post looks fine, and asks if the author has looked over it.

8:35 — “Haven’t had a chance,” replies the author. “Will this weekend, though.”

9:06 — Author adds word “Buttface” to previous message, to give sense of playfulness to otherwise business-like correspondence.

9:55 — Ohtani has induced a foul pop-up, it appears. That’s three outs.

10:01 — “Okay, cool,” responds Jackie, and appears to log out of gmail.

10:12 — The video has ended, it appears.