In a tune-up game for the World Baseball Classic, Shohei Ohtani dropped to one knee as he hit one of his two home runs for Japan Monday in a WBC exhibition game, reports Sports Illustrated.
Ohtani knocked out a 420-foot three-run homer in the third inning. He would follow that two innings later with a second three-run homer-this one presumably with two legs standing.
The crowd of 33,000 watched everything Ohtani did with anticipation. They even cheered him for just stepping into the batting cage in batting practice.
“(The cheers) gave me strength,” he said in a postgame interview, reported Kyodo News. “But it’s still not enough. Please cheer in even louder and louder voices.”
You can catch his second homer here.
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