Winning the American League's Most Valuable Player Award on Thursday was the icing on the cake for Shohei Ohtani and his remarkable 2021 season, in which he achieved career heights as a hitter, hitting 46 home runs while starting 23 games for the Los Angeles Angels.
Ohtani's unanimous selection made him, after Ichiro Suzuki in 2001, the second Japanese to win an MVP in the majors. And though Japan now celebrates Ohtani and Ichiro as national heroes, both only achieved that status after once being looked down on for the different way they wanted to play pro baseball.
Ichiro won three Pacific League MVP awards in Japan and seven straight batting titles, but that was only after he was shunned for two years by his first pro manager. Ichiro's refusal as a teenager to alter his now-iconic batting style with its pendulum front-leg swing, consigned him to spending most of his first two pro seasons in the minors.