However, the Japanese superstar was also part of a special moment before Saturday’s match. After his pregame workout, Ohtani learned the story of a woman watching him nearby from a wheelchair.
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Momoyo Nakamoto Kelley is a 100-year-old Japanese woman who survived the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. Currently a resident of Salt Lake City, she traveled to Denver to see Ohtani, whom she called “the pride of Japan” in statements to Chunichi Sports. Kelley said he watches Dodgers games every day to see the four-time MVP play.
Kelley was taken to the game by her grandson, Patrick Faust. The two traveled from nearby Fort Collins, where she was visiting family. Fausto was inspired to meet Ohtani when his grandmother reached an important age. The Dodgers star signed a baseball and posed for a photo with his 100-year-old fan.“Just the idea that 100 is such a big number,” Patrick said via MLB.com. “I don’t think there were many people (still alive) when the atomic bomb was dropped. She’s had a terrible experience, a big one. So we wanted to (do something) special. She watches every Dodger game and every Rockies game.”
After surviving the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki when she was 19, Kelley and her husband, whom she met at an Air Force base, immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s.
Kelley met several other players and coaches with Japanese connections, including Dodgers pitcher Roki Sasaki and Tomoyuki Sugano of the Rockies.
“Honestly, you don’t get these kinds of opportunities often,” Sugano told MLB.com through interpreter Yuto Sakurai. “So I’m very happy to have met her and to have had this kind of opportunity. She said that she is very passionate and that she really likes watching baseball and that she is a fan of my former team (the Yomiuri Giants).”
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Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was born in Okinawa, and broadcaster Stephen Nelson, whose mother is Japanese, also met Kelley and were moved by the experience.
“It’s humbling,” Nelson told MLB.com’s Manny Randhawa. “Just being ‘Yonsei’ (great-grandson of a Japanese immigrant) means you have a lot of shoulders.”
“For her to experience what happened and endure it, and come here to have a better life for herself and future generations,” he added. “We can’t even imagine that, can we?”
Ohtani now has the third-longest on-base streak in Dodgers history
In the baseball game that followed, Ohtani reached base safely for the 50th consecutive game. He tied Willie Keeler for the third-longest on-base streak in Dodgers history. Only Shawn Green (53) and Duke Snider (58) are now ahead of him.
The longest on-base streak in MLB history is 84 games, set by Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox.
Ohtani opened Saturday’s game by reaching on an error (which did not count toward a run), a ground ball to first base, a fly ball to left field and an interference error on Rockies catcher Hunter Goodman in his four previous plate appearances.
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The loss to the Rockies was the Dodgers’ first this season against a National League opponent. Their previous four losses were two against the Cleveland Guardians and one against the Toronto Blue Jays (last season’s World Series opponent) and the Texas Rangers.