Shohei Ohtani hit 55 home runs last season after signing one of the biggest contracts in North American sports history and has helped the Dodgers become back-to-back World Series champions in his first two years with the team.
And yet, to someone who knows him best, it still isn’t enough.
Ohtani’s 2023 Team Japan manager Hiroki Kuriyama recently shared his expectations of the global superstar.
“He’s only hit 55 home runs. He hasn’t won the Cy Young Award. He hasn’t even gotten 20 wins… That’s it.”
Kuriyama isn’t offering commentary from a distance. He was one of the few baseball decision-makers in Japan willing to fully embrace Ohtani’s desire to become a true two-way player at the professional level. Kuriyama helped develop Ohtani into a dominant pitcher and elite hitter with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, so this critical optimism is not something new.
Most people would say that Kuriyama was diminishing Ohtani’s accomplishments, but it seemed like what he was really doing was defining a new “Shohei Ohtani Benchmark” – not one measured against the league, but against Ohtani’s own ceiling.
And that’s a much higher bar.
Because when you change your goal, the 55 home runs isn’t the finish line, it’s just another milestone.
A Cy Young isn’t a celebration, it’s part of the résumé.
A 20-win season isn’t luck, it’s unfinished business.
Kuriyama did relent just a bit with the expectations and made sure that the priority is winning.
If the people who helped build Shohei Ohtani still believe there’s another level to be achieved, then the rest of the baseball world should pay attention. Because if 55 home runs and two world series championships are just steps along the way, the ceiling isn’t even in sight!