Shohei Ohtani was already a marvel when Canada first encountered him in 2012. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

It’s not always easy to know when you’re witnessing something truly extraordinary. Often it takes a little time and the benefit of hindsight. In the case of the Canadian Junior National Team, it took some mental math.

The day was Aug. 31, 2012. The setting: Seoul, South Korea — specifically Mokdong Baseball Stadium. The park had a capacity 10,500, but on that afternoon there were 125 fans in attendance to watch Canada take on Japan in the 18U Baseball World Championship.

At the time no one had any reason to believe there would be anything particularly consequential about the contest. Enter Shohei Ohtani.

The two-way phenom the baseball world has fallen in love with was no more than a tall 18-year-old then, but he made an instant impression that had the Canadians transfixed on the video board trying to convert kilometres into miles on the fly, admittedly a rare issue for a bunch of kids brought up with the metric system.

“We had this tall lanky righty and I remember thinking, ‘whatever no big deal’,” recalls Jesse Hodges, Canada’s third baseman. “But the radar gun was in kilometres and it was hitting 150 and then we started thinking ‘OK what’s going on here?'”

He wasn’t the only one on the Canadian bench whose eyes widened when he got a look at the numbers.

“Seeing the other pitchers in the tournament they were throwing 130 or whatever, but he was above and beyond that into the 145s or 150,” says Brett Siddall, who hit fifth and played first base that day. “We figured out, ‘hey this guy is doing something special right now.'”

Coming into the game, the Canucks had some intel on Ohtani, but they didn’t know precisely what they were dealing with. In fact, the scouting report back then didn’t have him as Japan’s most dangerous pitcher.

“Their best pitcher at the time was a guy named Shintaro Fujinami in terms of results and performance. He was a right-hander who was a first-round pick in the Japanese league,” recalls Greg Hamilton, the manager of the team and current Director of National Teams. “He was the real horse on that roster who was pretty good in his own right hitting 92, 93, 94 with four pitches and they ran him hard for a ton of innings in that tournament and Ohtani was kind of the highly projectable, big-upside physical arm.”

To be fair, Fujinami is currently a star in Japan with the Hanshin Tigers, but the Canucks didn’t realize what Ohtani was going to bring to the table.

“Greg told us we were facing a guy that was pretty highly regarded,” Siddall says. “So we knew he was going to be pretty good. Then he was throwing 97, 98, 99 and that was something we hadn’t seen before.”

The first man to see Ohtani’s stuff was outfielder Jacob Robson, now at Double-A in the Detroit Tigers system.

“I do remember that [at-bat]. I was the first hitter to face him,” he says. “I was the leadoff guy and I walked. He was throwing hard.”

He was also pretty wild. The first pitch of the day looked like this:

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He’d ultimately walk Robson on four pitches. but after a groundout, flyout, and strikeout he escaped the inning with an impression firmly made on the Canadian side.

In the second the shock and awe had worn off, but the Canadians still couldn’t get to him as he struck out the side and showed off both his mighty fastball in a strikeout of Siddall and his feel for the breaking ball by K-ing catcher Owen Spiwak.

View photos Via WBSC More

View photos Via WBSC More

Meanwhile, he was also going to work at the dish, where he stunned the Canadians by hitting cleanup.

“A lot of guys do that in high school, but never at the national level,” says Ryan Kellogg, his counterpart on the mound. “To able to pitch that way and say ‘I’m going to hit cleanup too’ takes a truly special talent.”

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