He threw 160 km/h in the semifinal, then lost the final on a home run he thought was foul

Shohei Ohtani's last summer at Hanamaki Higashi was supposed to end at Koshien, the national high school tournament held at Koshien Stadium near Osaka. It ended in the Iwate prefectural final. On the way there he reached the number his coach had written down for him. In the 2012 Iwate semifinal against Ichinoseki Gakuin, he was clocked at 160 km/h, about 99.4 mph, Baseball Channel reported in 2016. Number magazine called it the first 160 km/h by a high school pitcher in Japan.

The final against Morioka Daifuzoku turned on one swing. In the third inning, Morioka's Daichi Nihashi drove a high Ohtani fastball deep toward the left-field pole for a three-run homer. Some in the park thought it was foul, Baseball Channel wrote, but the third-base umpire signaled a home run. Morioka Daifuzoku won 5-3 and went to Koshien, where it lost its first game to Rissho University Shonan. Hanamaki Higashi stayed home.

Years later, Ohtani still remembered how the ball looked from the mound. In a 2019 Number interview, he recalled thinking, "That's foul," and laughed. Number framed the loss as the unfinished business of his school years: the two-way player in his final summer, the record pitch, and no Koshien. The Baseball Channel piece told it from the other side, following Nihashi, who said he wanted to hit one more home run off Ohtani someday.

That fall Ohtani also pitched for Japan at the 18U world championship. Baseball-Reference's Bullpen records him at 0-1 with 16 strikeouts and 8 walks in 10 1/3 innings, including 12 strikeouts in seven innings in the fifth-place game. By then the bigger question in Japan was where he would go next, and his answer would set up the 2012 draft.