*Originally published in Japanese in Forbes JAPAN on April 23, 2023.
English translation by the author.
The 2023 World Baseball Classic left behind moments that will shape how we think about excellence for years to come. Japan's championship run. The players' unguarded, unpretentious energy. And, of course, Shohei Ohtani.
What stood out most was his pep talk moments before the final against the United States: "Let's stop admiring them." It wasn't just the words. Watching the footage again, the tone of his voice, his
expression, his whole bearing—all of it belonged to someone built to surpass, not to admire.
It was the voice of someone living squarely on the world stage, a figure of this era. Watch the clip again if you haven't already:
"Just one thing from me: let's stop admiring them. Goldschmidt's on first, Mike Trout's in center, Mookie Betts is out in the outfield—if you've played baseball, these are names you've grown up hearing. But just for today, let's put admiration aside. If we admire them, we can't surpass them. We came here to be on top, to win. So just for today, let's forget our admiration for them and focus only on winning. Let's go."
There's intensity in those words, but no strain. And it's precisely the absence of unnecessary tension that let the team pour everything into the game.
He also flipped a switch that freed his teammates from something that can otherwise bind judgment and thought: admiration itself. He was likely speaking to himself as much as to them. By setting that aside, the players could stop hesitating, stop second-guessing, and give the game their full mental focus.
The players' hesitation dropped sharply
Research by Cambridge University's Barbara Sahakian suggests a person makes up to 35,000 decisions a day, large and small.
Ohtani's words mattered here too. It's not an exaggeration to say the number of decisions—the moments of hesitation—Japan's players had to navigate during the game dropped sharply because of that one sentence.
Hesitation is where people flinch. It's the crack where an opening—and a loss of nerve—can creep in. And every decision carries its own accumulating stress. Ohtani's call to action cleared away that hesitation and converted it into usable energy for the game itself, which naturally translated into better performance on the field.
Admiration is not the same as respect
What mattered most was how he delivered this: lightly, but with real sincerity, giving his teammates permission to set aside the kind of reverence that, in a culture built around hierarchy, can easily hold people back.
One can imagine how much lighter Japan's players felt hearing it. The words surely carried something of Ohtani's own experience playing in the United States.
Letting go of admiration doesn't mean disrespecting your opponent—let alone belittling them. Admiration and respect are not the same thing.
In sports especially, if you genuinely respect an opponent as a competitor, holding back is the greater disrespect.
In a world defined by winners and losers, either outcome should be acceptable on its own terms. But if you're too intimidated to give your full effort and let the other side win by default, that's not a win either side actually wants. It reads as not taking the moment seriously—and it risks disappointing the very opponent whose respect you wanted most. A victory won that way earns applause from the crowd, but the players themselves feel none of its value.
This is especially true for elite athletes who have faced countless high-stakes moments and fought through them with everything they had: a win like that wouldn't count as something to be proud of. It might even become a game they'd rather forget.
And the audience notices too. They can tell when a win happened without the winner having grown from it. The more influence a sport carries in society, the more it matters that athletes set aside admiration for their opponents when it's time to compete.
That's exactly why respect demands full effort. Setting admiration aside, for that one moment, is what makes real competition possible.
It's also worth noting that Ohtani's words seem rooted in something larger: the principle of equity, one pillar of the"DEI"—diversity, inclusion, equity—framework now considered essential across the U.S. and much of the world.
Equity cannot exist without mutual respect. And when that respect flows both ways, it deepens into gratitude, builds trust, and grows into a relationship worth having. Telling evidence of this: in interviews with Alex Rodriguez and others on Fox News, Ohtani expresses genuine respect and
gratitude toward his rivals—and they, in turn, show the same toward him.
Neither inflating nor diminishing himself
Ohtani's words that day were called, across American social media, "the most respectful trash talk in sports history."
What runs through everything he says is sincerity without theatrics. He's a different species from the loud, dramatic personalities that have traditionally captured attention.
If anything, he reads as the quiet type. His greatness isn't just his talent on the field—it's that he isn't fearful, isn't forcing anything, doesn't oversell himself, doesn't over-talk, isn't loud. Paired with his imposing physical presence and an approachable face, he simply walks into a room as himself, without effort.
Watching his expressions, his posture, the plainness and ease with which he speaks about himself, his team, and his opponents—you sense someone who treats himself as neither larger nor smaller than he actually is. Just his true size, speaking plainly about everyone involved.
Whether he's even aware of this himself is unclear. But it hardly matters. If it comes this naturally to him, that only makes it more remarkable.
And that quality is exactly what reached Japan's players—so much so that "let's stop admiring them" became the very thing people admired, and the phrase spread widely because of it. Which is fitting: admiration is a perfectly good doorway into curiosity and awareness in the first place.
One word American baseball media often reach for when praising Ohtani is "unicorn"—someone who makes the impossible happen.
At this WBC, he added yet another chapter to that legend. Here's hoping he keeps moving forward and upward, unburdened and unhurried, giving the world more reasons to admire him.
This article is part of Insights by Niena Etsuko Hino, a collection of selected English articles and translations exploring branding, executive presence, and cross-cultural business strategy.