When Brett Phillips learned this morning that his former teammate, Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, had announced his marriage on Instagram, Phillips cycled through reactions. He was happy for his friend. He was curious about the wedding. And mostly he wondered if he’d been a bad teammate.
“I do feel bad that I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend,” Phillips says.
Phillips, now with the Chicago White Sox, shouldn’t feel too bad. He only played with Ohtani for part of one season; star Los Angeles Angels centerfielder Mike Trout, who spent six years with Ohtani, didn’t know, either.
Ohtani, 29, operates with as much secrecy as possible for a man who can make the front page of every newspaper in his native Japan simply by leaving his home. Japanese reporters at Dodgers camp on Thursday said every television station in Japan broke into programming to announce Ohtani’s nuptials, the way they usually only do to warn citizens of natural disasters or war, and some newspapers printed special editions.
Ohtani will not comment on where he lives or which elbow surgery he had last year. (The Los Angeles Times has reported it was a second Tommy John surgery.) He reportedly told teams pursuing him as a free agent this winter that he would hold any leaks about the process against them. He even instructed the people close to him not to reveal the name of his nederlandse kooikerhondje this winter. (Ohtani finally disclosed at the press conference announcing his historic deal with the Dodgers that the dog’s name is Decoy, after six weeks of, ahem, hounding.)
On Thursday, he became the rare baseball player to hold a press conference to address his marital status. “I felt like it was good timing [for the announcement] because it was before the season,” he said through interpreter Ippei Mizuhara. “I didn’t want any distractions when the season started. And I would have liked to announce it earlier, but there was some paperwork issues that lagged the whole process. So that was the whole deal.”
His Instagram post referred to his wife only as a “someone from my Native country of Japan who is very special to me” and included just text and a photo of Decoy. On Thursday Ohtani said his wife is a “normal Japanese woman” he has known for three or four years. He said he proposed last year. He declined to provide any information about her name, the wedding date or the guest list. Ohtani’s longtime interpreter and friend, Ippei Mizuhara, says he cannot not comment on whether he attended.
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Even though Ohtani has deferred 97% of the 10-year, $700 million deal he signed with the Dodgers before this season, he could certainly have afforded a grand affair. If he threw one, he does not appear to have invited any of his new teammates. That is perhaps not the best way to make a first impression, but none of the players surveyed by Sports Illustrated would cop to being insulted at having been left out.
“It’s cool,” says Dodgers outfielder Chris Taylor, who celebrated his own nuptials in December 2022. “He wasn’t invited to mine.”
Utilityman Enrique Hernández says he has some follow-up questions before he can decide how he feels about the whole thing. “He only posted a picture of his dog,” he says. “So I want to ask him if he married his dog.”
Manager Dave Roberts, through a grin, says he is offended—but adds that he is also offended he wasn’t invited to my wedding. (It was in June, I point out. He was busy. Roberts is unmoved by this argument.)
One Dodgers official admits that the team had no idea that he even had a girlfriend—a fairly remarkable failure of intelligence-gathering given the commitment the organization made to him. Maybe, like Phillips, they have some thinking to do.
On second thought, Phillips is pretty sure he did ask once, and Ohtani waved him off. “That’s more secretive than, like, spoilers for The Bachelor,” Phillips says. “Jeez!”
