| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today, with the World Series underway, we're featuring a story by Lucas Shaw from our archives about one of its stars. The Los Angeles Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani in the offseason, hoping he'd help carry them to MLB's championship series. With that goal achieved, and a groundbreaking 50-50 season in the books, it remains to be seen whether his incredible talent will help sell the world on the beauty of baseball. You can find the whole story from March online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. On a warm February morning in the Phoenix suburbs, hundreds of people gathered at the Los Angeles Dodgers' spring training facility hours before the start of practice. They flanked the path between the locker room and the field, hoping to score an autograph. Kids flooded the team store to shop for jerseys and hats. The site, known as Camelback Ranch, has long been a destination in late winter, when baseball teams get ready for the season ahead. The Dodgers are one of the sport's most popular clubs—seven-time World Series champions that annually lead the league in attendance—but the crowds this year have been three or four times normal size. "I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it," says Tim Kurkjian, a baseball writer and ESPN analyst who's been attending spring training for 44 years. "It was a circus. It was amazing how many people were there, and it was all because of him." Him is Shohei Ohtani. The Dodgers signed him in the offseason after his contract expired with the Los Angeles Angels, who'd won the Ohtani sweepstakes when he left Japan in 2018 to come play in the US. The 6-foot-4-inch 23-year-old was the most hyped baseball import in history. Now 29, he's considered the best player on the planet and one of the greatest to ever step on a field. Ohtani was the American League's Most Valuable Player last year, the second time he's won the award in the last three seasons. He could've earned the honors based solely on his hitting—he led the league in home runs and several other categories—but he also won 10 games as a pitcher. Professional baseball players simply don't do both; in fact, no other slugger has had this kind of talent since a guy named Babe Ruth. Ohtani is already the most famous athlete in Japan, the pride of a baseball-crazed nation. His games are broadcast live there, and his name is a headline fixture in the daily sports press. Yet for the first six years of his career in the US, Ohtani toiled in relative obscurity in his adopted country. It didn't help that he's a quiet guy who grants few interviews, posts infrequently on social media and was on a team with eight straight losing seasons (that technically plays in Anaheim, not LA). Yet his legend grew in December when he signed a 10-year, $700 million deal with the Dodgers. That contract, the biggest in the history of team sports, has turned Ohtani's every move into a spectacle. Tens of millions of people worldwide watched the press conference at which the Dodgers welcomed No. 17 to the team. The league says his new jersey sold faster at online sports retailer Fanatics than any other ever had, doubling the sales of Lionel Messi's Inter Miami kit.  Ohtani at the plate during a preseason exhibition in Seoul. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg Major League Baseball hasn't had a player who commands this kind of attention in years, and it's never had one with such a rabid global following. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who's been around the game for more than 30 years as a player and coach, compared interest in Ohtani to Beatlemania and Ohtani himself to baseball players such as … well, no one. The only parallels he could make were Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan—whom he was presumably referencing for his legendary career with the Chicago Bulls, not his .202 average for a Chicago White Sox minor league team. The challenge for MLB will be to not whiff in harnessing this enthusiasm, converting Ohtani fans into baseball fans. Once America's pastime, the sport has hemorrhaged popularity to the National Football League and National Basketball Association—to say nothing of soccer. TV ratings for the World Series in the US have declined about 80% from their peak; the sport's biggest telecasts of the year are less popular than the average regular season NFL game, though baseball is hardly alone in that regard. Attendance is down from its highs. The league and the Dodgers expect that Ohtani's move to his new team will amplify his success, and thus the sport's. Already, average resale ticket prices for Dodgers home games have risen more than 10% (to $200 from $180 on StubHub, compared with this time last year), while total sales have more than tripled—thanks in part to fans in Japan. To help reward interest overseas, the Dodgers are opening the season with games against the San Diego Padres in Seoul, on March 20 and 21, the first MLB games in South Korea. (LA beat San Diego, 5-2, in the first game, thanks in part to a key single by Ohtani in the eighth inning.) The Dodgers are also engaged with new sponsors, many from Asia. At the team's urging, Ohtani has even made himself more available to the press, though not for this article. "This is the best opportunity baseball has to regain market share on other sports," Roberts says, citing not just Ohtani but fellow Dodgers star Mookie Betts and Ohtani's former Angels teammate Mike Trout. "Clearly football has it right now, but our goal should be to be the most popular sport in the world." Keep reading: Selling Shohei Ohtani: Can Baseball's Biggest Talent Transform the Sport? | 
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