Naoyuki Yanagihara’s life mostly revolves around Shohei Ohtani.
If he posts on his Instagram page, Yanagihara writes about it. Everywhere Ohtani travels for baseball, Yanagihara follows. During spring training, if Ohtani isn’t at the Tempe, Ariz., facility yet, he waits for his car to pull up.
Yanagihara, who writes for Sports Nippon, an all-sports daily Japanese newspaper, has been covering Ohtani since 2013, his rookie year with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
Yanagihara does not live in the U.S. His home is in Tokyo, where he lives with his wife and 9-month old baby for half the year, spending the other half living out of hotels in the U.S.
“Everyday I make a phone call, a video call to my wife,” he said. “Around 7 or 8 p.m., so it’s morning over in Japan. I always struggle with jet lag.”
This is the life of a Japanese sportswriter, one assigned to cover the country’s biggest star playing in Major League Baseball. He’s one of dozens who, since Ohtani signed with the Angels in December 2017, has been to just about every game and every day of spring training that Ohtani is at.
And he’ll likely be one of the dozens who, depending on what happens this season with the Angels, could be following Ohtani to another city should he sign elsewhere in free agency or be moved before the end of the season.
“He has changed my life completely,” he said. “I have to follow him almost every day, every year.”
Ohtani is more popular to Japanese media and culture than Hideo Nomo, who spent nearly seven of his 12 MLB seasons with the Dodgers. And Ohtani’s even bigger than Ichiro Suzuki, who spent the majority of his 18-plus seasons in the big leagues with the Seattle Mariners.
Ohtani is not just the biggest baseball star the country has had — his global reach already makes that point clear.
“He’s a Japanese idol, an icon,” Yanagihara said.
“It’s very important for us to also take videos and take photos [of him] because he’s so handsome and he’s cool and he’s just like a pop star,” added Taro Abe, who has been on the Ohtani beat for the last two years for another daily Japanese newspaper, the Chunichi Shimbun.
Does that make him the…