At 15, Ohtani wrote his target in the middle of a sheet: first-round pick of eight teams
Every Hanamaki Higashi player fills in a goal-setting chart on arrival. Japanese reporting shows how Ohtani's was set against Yusei Kikuchi's, and how the 2012 draft answered it.
Key points
- At Hanamaki Higashi High School, players write a main goal in the center of a goal-setting sheet and the steps to reach it around it, according to writer Toru Sasaki in @DIME.
- Ohtani wrote "first-round pick, eight teams" in the center as a first-year. Coach Hiroshi Sasaki also set him the target of throwing 160 km/h.
- Both targets were set to go beyond Yusei Kikuchi, who left the school as a first-round pick of six teams, Number Web reported.
The goal-setting sheet is the most quoted document from Shohei Ohtani's school years in Japan. English-speaking fans often know it as the mandala chart. At Hanamaki Higashi High School in Iwate, every player fills one in soon after arriving, the sports writer Toru Sasaki wrote in a 2018 piece for the magazine @DIME. The main goal goes in the center square. The squares around it hold what the player needs to get there, and the words can change over three years.
In the center of his sheet, the first-year Ohtani wrote "ドラ1 8球団": a first-round draft pick of eight teams. Around it, @DIME lists words such as sharpness, control, building the body, mentality, character and luck. SPREAD, reporting in 2024 on why Ohtani picks up litter at ballparks, described the format as the Harada method and noted that luck was one of the eight elements on his sheet. The chart has been reprinted widely in Japan, but the reporting we found quotes only parts of it, so we list only the words those outlets name.
The numbers on the sheet were not random. In a 2021 Number Web interview by Yuta Ishida, the story is that coach Hiroshi Sasaki drew on his experience with Yusei Kikuchi, who had left the same school just before Ohtani arrived, as a first-round pick of six teams. For Ohtani, Sasaki set two marks above that: 160 km/h, about 99.4 mph, and eight first-round picks. Kikuchi's own sheet, Number Web reported in 2019, had aimed for 155 km/h and a national title. Ohtani told Ishida he did not want to decide in advance that something was impossible. "If I thought I couldn't do it, that was the end," he said of the 160 km/h target.
Half of the plan came true. He threw 160 km/h in the summer of 2012, a story covered later in this series. The other half did not. After he said he wanted to go straight to the majors, only one team, the Nippon-Ham Fighters, named him in the first round. That gap between the sheet and the draft is where the Ohtani story in Japan begins.
Original Japanese headlines
「自分は自分だと思ったこともないので……」大谷翔平が振り返る“『雄星はこうだった』とよく言われた高校時代”
Number Web, Aug. 11, 2021
先人を超えたい！圧倒的な向上心を持ち続けた高校時代の大谷翔平
@DIME, July 15, 2018
菊池雄星と大谷翔平の恩師が語る、花巻東育成メソッドと6年間の物語。
Number Web, Jan. 15, 2019
【MLB】大谷翔平が球場の“ゴミを拾う理由”を現地メディアが解説 「誰もが彼から学ぶべきだ」と海外ファン
SPREAD, June 14, 2024
Players in this storyShohei Ohtani
Our read
The sheet is often presented in Japan as a self-help tool, and the full grid is easy to find reprinted. We kept to what reporters attribute to it. The more telling detail is the benchmark: the targets were written to beat a specific older teammate, which makes the sheet less a dream board than a coach's plan.