Video shows Japanese language quirk and translation snafu might be hurting the baseball star’s image.

It hasn’t been the smoothest start to the season for baseball star Shohei Ohtani. First there was the scandal of his longtime interpreter being involved in illegal sports gambling, and using money from Ohtani’s bank account to pay off those debts. Then there was Ohtani’s bat being pretty quiet, with zero home runs in his first eight games after a toweringly high-publicity move to the Los Angeles Dodgers during the offseason.

But it was only a matter of time until Ohtani hit his first homer while wearing Dodger blue, and it was a particularly sweet one for fans, coming at home on Wednesday night against the team’s hated rival, the San Francisco Giants, with L.A. going on to win the game by a single run.

Even better, Ohtani’s first Dodger home run ball ended up in the hands of a Dodger fan, Ambar Roman, as shown in the video here.

So smiles all around, right? Well, not entirely. As Major League Baseball fans already know, when a fan catches a home run ball, it’s theirs to keep. In the case of balls with a special significance to the team or player who hit it though, oftentimes the fan will be approached by team officials, who’ll work out some sort of trade (memorabilia, tickets too future games, etc.) in exchange for the ball.

After talking with Dodgers staff, Roman agreed to part with the home run ball in exchange for a pair of autographed hats, an autographed bat, and an autographed ball. Some have said the Dodgers should have offered compensation of greater value, but Roman, who attended the game with her husband, doesn’t appear to have explicitly said anything to that effect, but there is something more she would have liked, as she mentioned when speaking to broadcaster NBC.

“We wanted to meet him for sure…We really waited for him to come out and at least take a picture, exchange some words but nothing. Everything happened really fast.”

Obviously, Ohtani wasn’t in a position to make a detour while rounding the bases to run out to the outfield and introduce himself to Roman, seeing how the game was still going on at the time. As for a post-game meet-up with her, a failure to arrange that is really on the Dodgers/stadium staff too, rather than Ohtani himself.

However, multiple U.S. media outlets are reporting that Ohtani lied and said that he had met with Ramon. During a post-game interview, a reporter asked Ohtani “Were you able to get the [home run] ball, and if so are you sentimental that you can keep it?” Ohtani, as is his standard practice when speaking with the media, waited for his interpreter to translate the question into Japanese, then responded in Japanese and had the interpreter translate his response into English, which he did as:

“Yeah, I was able to talk to the fan, be able, and was able to get it back. Obviously, um, it’s a very special ball, uh, a lot of feelings towards it. I’m very grateful that it’s back.”

▼ The interview

This has led to headlines and article passages like “Shohei Ohtani says he talked to fan who caught his first Dodgers home run, but she says they never met” (CBS), “getting caught in an apparent lie over something as trivial as meeting a fan can’t be ignored” (Yahoo! Sports), and “Shohei Ohtani Apparently Lied About Meeting the Fan Who Caught His First Dodgers Home Run Ball” (Barstool Sports).

And it’s pretty clearly a lie, right? Not exactly. See, a quirk about the Japanese language is that the vocabulary tends to have a lot of syllables, so many that even native speakers often find it a pain. Because of that, when speaking it’s very common to omit things that can be understood by context, including the subject of a verb. For example, if someone asks “Did you buy the mint chocolate taiyaki?” you don’t have to say “Mise wa sorera wo utteinai” to say “The shop isn’t selling them.” You can just say “Utteinai” (literally “not selling”), and the rest is understood.

That might sound like an insanely difficult way to communicate, but 99 times out of a hundred it doesn’t cause any problems. Unfortunately, it looks like Ohtani’s response to the question about the home run ball is one of those instances where the speaker (Ohtani) and the listener (his interpreter) weren’t on the same mental page regarding an omitted subject.

Going back to the post-game interview, after the reporter asks Ohtani about the ball, he says, in Japanese:

“Eto, ma modotte, ano, fan no hito to hanshite, hai itadakeru koto ga, hai, ano, boku ni totte sugoku otkubetsu na boru na no de arigatai.”

There are three verbs in there, modotte (come back), hanashite (talk), and itadakeru (receive), and none of them have an explicitly stated verb for who or what is returning, talking, or receiving.

“Well, the reporter asked Ohtani if he got the ball back and how he was sentimental that he could keep it, so he must have been talking about himself and meant ‘I’ for the verbs in his response,” you might be thinking, but look again at the first verb, modotte/come back. It’s the ball that came back, not Ohtani. He’s clearly not intending “I” to be the subject for every verb in the sentence, and it’s possible that when he said hanashite/talk, we didn’t mean “I talked to the fan,” but “Someone in the Dodgers organization talked to the fan.”

Again, when a fan catches a significant home run ball, it’s normal for some sort of negotiation to take place for its return immediately after the catch, and it’s not going to be the player who makes that approach. It’s going to be someone from the team staff, and with this being common knowledge, it’d be understandable that Ohtani wouldn’t feel the need to include that in his response. On the other hand, it’s also not uncommon for players to personally greet the fan who caught their home run ball after the game, which seems to have been the scenario that Ohtani’s interpreter was picturing when he responded to the reporter’s question, apparently assuming Ohtani had somehow met with Roman while the interpreter wasn’t present.

In short, in translating Japanese to English, especially spoken Japanese, translators often have to make a judgement call regarding unspoken verb subjects, and it looks like this was a case where either “I talked to the fan” or “somebody talked to the fan” re plausible scenarios, and the interpreter guessed wrong. Whether that’s on Ohtani for not noticing the potential vagueness in his choice of words, or on his interpreter for not recognizing the need for clarification, or whether they share the blame is up for debate, but it seems pretty unlikely that Ohtani, who’s been consistently described as humble and courteous since arriving in the Major Leagues, decided on the spur of the moment to lie.

And last, it should be noted that Roman doesn’t seem too bent out of shape about the incident. “If in the future he [Ohtani] would like to do a meet and greet, we’re very open to it. Throw in some tickets maybe. Overall, we wouldn’t trade this experience for anything,” she said in her interview, so maybe Ohtani will soon be able to say “I talked to the fan” after all.

Source: Yahoo! Sports, NBC Los Angeles, CBS Sports, Barstool Sports, YouTube/Dodger Blue
Top image: Pakutaso
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