“He does! He does, in fact, square it up. That’s long gone!” That’s what Patrick O’Neal said when Shohei Ohtani hit a 3 run home run to bring his team back into the game. Shohei Ohtani is one of the biggest, one of the newest stars in the MLB. He has been pitching and hitting amazingly. He played two games on back to back days and had 8 RBI’s and 13 strikeouts in two games. Diets play a very big factor in sports and especially for Ohtani. Ohtani’s diet is a Keto diet, which is a low carb, high fat diet that offers many health benefits. Studies have shown that the ketogenic diet helps with losing weight, and it improves your health. I decided to write about Shohei Ohtani because he’s one of the newest stars in the MLB and he’s dominating the league.
Shohei Ohtani started playing baseball for a Japanese team in Japan. Before he joined the MLB, Ohtani never really focused on his diet and nutrition. When he joined the Majors, he was supplied with a dietician and a nutritionist. A majority of Major League teams supply their athletes with nutritionists to help their players stay healthy and play well. Ohtani also tries to eat a lot of foods with hydrocortisone. Hydrocortisone is a natural steroid found in pork, meat products, fish, and poultry. Before he joined the majors in 2018, Ohtani worked out with Yu Darvish, another MLB pitcher during the winter. During that winter, he gained 20 pounds of straight muscle. This is not normal for an average baseball player. If they put on pounds, it’s normally around 2 to 5 pounds of muscle.
When Ohtani first joined the Majors in 2018, “he was very thin,” according to his dietician. He was so thin that Ohtani started eating almost seven meals a day including supplements to help him build muscle. While on this diet, Ohtani’s aches and pains started to go away, and this helped Ohtani’s performance in the MLB.
The Major League Baseball teams play a 162 game season in a span of six months. Out of thirty teams, twelve make the playoffs, which continue into October, and only one team can be the champion. The average Major League Baseball player burns about 500 calories an hour during a game. Each Major League Baseball game is about three and a half hours long. This means each player burns about 1,200 calories a game, which is a good amount for an average baseball player. Baseball players need between 0.55 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. The diet for getting more protein is eating a lot of protein-packed foods such as chicken, fish, and meat based products. Shohei Ohtani has had a very good season so far. He continues to perform by hitting and pitching very well. Ohtani has been on a Keto diet since 2016 which is when his career really started to take off. Ohtani is one of the most exciting players in the league today with a 2.80 earned run average and 20 home runs. All of these stats are from eating and staying healthy, which is why Ohtani is on a specific diet. So in conclusion, diets benefit players and their health, but committing to a diet is hard to do because your body is already used to the old foods you are trying to get away from. This just proves Ohtani is willing to go the extra mile and capture his chance at being one of the best in the league.
