Shohei Ohtani Cements Status as Most Private Athlete Ever By Revealing Secret Wife

Shohei is an MVP wrapped inside a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. While America was sleeping, Ohtani announced that he was married. He did this on social media, completely out of nowhere, as if he was announcing he had just eaten a slice of pizza. It was the quintessential Ohtani gossip reveal. No one had asked and no details were given. It is just now known and that's all we get.

Honestly, it's quite impressive. No other famous person can do this. Or maybe no other famous person wants to do this. All anyone really knows about Ohtani is that he can hit and pitch. Or at least we used to know that. He suffered an arm injury that required surgery last season, but even he hasn't revealed exactly what that surgery was (Tommy John? Again? Maybe?). We know he's hitting again because we can see it with our own eyes. He'll probably pitch again in 2025, but who knows! Wait and see because he's not going to tell you. In an era where we know everything, he's let us know nothing.

Just think back to the privacy required to meet with Ohtani while he was a free agent. Jeff Passan reported in November that Ohtani wanted to keep his free agency meetings completely under wraps. Via ESPN:

If there is one thing to know about Shohei Ohtani's free agency, it's that you are unlikely to know much about it until he signs somewhere," Passan wrote. "If visits between Ohtani and a team are reported publicly, it will be held against the team, so the circles will be tiny and tight."

A few days later, Ohtani collected his second MVP and did so with a dog in his lap. Ohtani then made the public wait a month before he revealed the name. Interest was so high and information so scant that even Pablo Torre and his team of very serious investigative journalists tried to find out the dog's name.

Yet all Torre could find out was fake news. A week later, Ohtani revealed the dog's name at a press conference after he also revealed that he had signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The most revealing part of all this was that Dodgers manager Dave Roberts admitted that the Dodgers had a meeting with Ohtani and he still signed with them. It begs the question, what don't we know about those negotiations or what the other teams might have done to drive him into the arms of the highest payroll in sports. So maybe Ohtani only cares about money, which the Dodgers gave him a lot of.

But he also deferred most of it because he doesn't need it, even though he was apparently planning a wedding at the time. Maybe it was a startegic play on the Dodgers part. Not because they didn't have the cash, but because considering what we now know about Ohtani's love of privacy, you have to wonder if he would have taken payment up front, purchased all the tickets to home Dodgers games and bought the rights to broadcast their games and then just not aired them. That way he could play out the rest of his career with no one but his wife in the stands.

Of course, that would require him to tell her that he's a professional baseball player. For all we know about what she knows, he may have only revealed that he works in Los Angeles, California and travels a lot for work. Somebody's got to stay home and watch the dog.