Ohtani said he was going to the majors. Nippon-Ham drafted him anyway, and Japan called it reckless

On Oct. 21, 2012, Shohei Ohtani said he wanted to pitch in the major leagues and would turn down Japanese clubs. J-CAST News reported that the statement forced many teams to change their draft plans. A high school pitcher who had thrown 160 km/h was now, on paper, unsignable.

Nippon-Ham did not change its plan. Manager Hideki Kuriyama said the day before the Oct. 25 draft that the club would take Ohtani, and it did, the only one of the 12 clubs to take him in the first round. "I think Ohtani is the No. 1 pitcher," Kuriyama said, according to J-CAST. In the same draft, Hanshin won Shintaro Fujinami of Osaka Toin in a four-team lottery. Ohtani, after being picked, said his wish to go to the United States had not changed.

The Japanese press called it a 強行指名, a forced pick. J-CAST wrote that many in the industry saw it as reckless and an all-or-nothing bet, noting that Nippon-Ham had drafted Tomoyuki Sugano first in 2011 and been turned down. The same piece speculated that the club might offer a contract letting Ohtani move to the majors later. That was the writer's guess at the time, not a reported fact. Bungeishunju later recalled criticism that the club was trying to crush a young man's dream. General manager Masao Yamada's answer, quoted in that piece, became the line people remember: the draft is about taking the player you want, not the one you can get.

The draft also closed the loop on his high school sheet. Ohtani had written "first-round pick, eight teams" as a first-year, as covered earlier in this series. By saying he was going to the majors, he got one. The next question was whether one club could change his mind.