Volume 5, Entry 22: Two-Way Player

Sleep deprivation and Shohei Ohtani

You wake up with a tourniquet tied around your brain.

The human brain has no pain receptors, so this sensation shouldn’t be possible, but you feel the rubber knot digging into your frontal lobes all the same, the band pulling tighter and tighter by the minute. The pressure squeezes your brain like a stress ball, exploding it outward with such force that your skull aches. Your eyes stay open reluctantly; you can’t close them for the risk of the tourniquet looping around them, too.

The feeling doesn’t go away, but you become accustomed to it. Your reshaped brain settles into its mushroom form, the abrasive gouges from your inner skull scarring over while you blink through the pain.

But then the other symptoms arrive. First, the dizziness slaps a question mark at the end of every footstep. If you close your eyes, the world careens in every direction at once; you’re in NASA’s training gimbal without a seat belt or a space suit. It should be a solace that, upon finishing a blink, the world is steady around you, but your eyelids close dozens of times per minute. Riding the Tilt-a-whirl is one thing; teleporting on and off one every few seconds is another entirely.

Your stomach seizes, begging for food while fighting to evacuate what meager crumbs remain from your last meal. You shouldn’t be hungry at 2:10 am, but your body can’t figure out what to do, so it begs for the only comfort it recalls. You chug water instead, seeking to balance the acidic ache.

No symptom ruins you more than the vibrating. You feel yourself shaking violently, your brain losing its war against that rubber ribbon. Everything moves to a buzzing hum inside your arms, like industrial saws ramming against every one of your 206 bones at once. You can’t tell whether you’re burning up or freezing, the whirring so overwhelming that you quake, your San Andreas sternum the epicenter of Richter-breaking rumbling. Yet when you lift your hand to examine its ferocious trembling, you see the steadiest appendage this side of the Mississippi. The shaking that threatens to liquefy your digestive tract never escapes your skin.

Sometimes, if you distract yourself, you can pretend it away. The invisible vibrations become the growling hum of a massive tanker screeching past you on a crowded freeway, and that barbaric hunger whets your appetite for breakfast. That 360° vice grip ratcheting tighter every second becomes a concrete heaviness, a late-stage sinus infection, which shouldn’t be a comfort but is. A sinus infection isn’t your fault, after all; you don’t control your mucus production or the intensity with which pollen inflames your immune system.

There’s a relief in the thought that all of this stumbling, seizing, searing misery might be outside your control. Not a physical relief; when these symptoms burrow in, they hold court for an hour or two. It’s an emotional relief to imagine an abdication of responsibility, to hide from the lyrics in “Anti-Hero” and fantasize that this destruction has befallen you rather than been orchestrated, instrument by instrument, with your own two shaking-but-not hands.

Deep down, in the belly of the buzzing, there’s the coherent part of you who sees through that flagrant fiction. You’ve not been put upon by these malignancies. You unlocked the door, you propped the thing open with a pair of midnight black Nikes, and you rang the triangle to summon every symptom in for a meal of feasting on you.

Other people will say you did this to yourself at 2:03 am when the alarm on your phone sounded. These people will be wrong; it wasn’t the time you got up that wrecked your body for its first two hours of the day and left you physically ill every time you stopped moving until crumbling into bed twenty hours later.

It wasn’t waking up that invited these ailments; it was when you went to bed that cursed you.

But you got it all done! you think. You did everything!

At least, you think that’s what you think underneath the tourniquet and alongside the queasiness while reeling to the rhythms of the endless earthquake buzzing inside you.

It’s hard for you to tell in this condition.

*****

Even if you don’t follow baseball, you probably know Shohei Ohtani.

The Japanese superstar, formerly a Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighter and Los Angeles Angel but now a member of the deep-pocketed Dodgers, is everywhere in a way baseball players rarely are. Ohtani transcends the sport: even when he’s adjacent to controversy, like this spring’s scandal involving his interpreter’s gambling, it’s national news on both sides of the Pacific.

For the uninitiated, Shohei Ohtani draws this attention because he is a singular presence defined by duality at the highest levels of professional baseball. He excels as both a hitter and a pitcher, a skill set so rare that only the legendary Babe Ruth suits invocation. But even the borderline-mythical Ruth pales in comparison upon closer looks: Ruth pitched extensively for only his first eight years before transitioning into a slugging outfielder for his final fourteen.

Ohtani, on the other hand, has done both for his entire career. During his six prior big league seasons, Shohei has pitched extensively during four of them, with the other two years lost to injury. This followed five seasons in Hokkaido, where he was a full-time starting pitcher and outfielder.

While young kids often play both ways, specialization reigns supreme in professional sports. To hit in the MLB requires intense training, including hours of cage work, grinding tape of old at-bats to find and isolate flaws, and studying scouting reports well enough to make plate appearances with a plan. All this accompanies the strength and conditioning requisite for any professional athlete, with weights, cardio, and stretching all vital components.

But being a pitcher also requires this sort of extensive commitment. Bullpen sessions, stamina-building sprints, pitch lab training for shape and spin, learning scouting reports frontward and back to stay ahead of hitters—all of these also demand hours. Hitting is a full-time job…and so is pitching. Each necessitates a time-consuming regiment of exercises, drills, and preparation to perform at even a mediocre level.

Many star players excelled on the mound and at the plate as amateurs but shifted to one or the other when they turned pro. Skeptical scouts saw greater potential on the mound than at the plate for the A’s former slugger, Matt Olson; last year’s top draft pick, Paul Skenes, actually pitched and caught at Air Force before shifting to the mound full-time for LSU and, as of this month, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It’s not that Olson and Skenes couldn’t have been skilled professionals in their other roles; both had—and likely still have—untapped abilities most of us will never attain 0.2% of. But neither of them even pursued such an arrangement. The training demands of doing more inflict intense strain upon bodies that already produce value; no one wants to risk superstar production by subjecting a body to the wear and tear of playing both ways.

No body, that is, except Shohei Ohtani’s. Only Ohtani possesses so much skill in both dimensions that teams overlook the dangers and willingly stretch him like pizza dough. Rarely has Shohei looked exhausted during his time in Major League Baseball, but he’s taken on two full workloads since he arrived, and when he hasn’t been injured, he’s thrived in both roles.

Which brings me to now. Ohtani signed the richest contract in sports this past offseason, inking a back-loaded $700M deal. Whether you insist on recording that sum as its present value of $460M or the jaw-dropper listed in the press release, that’s a borderline unfathomable amount of money, made even more incredible by Ohtani’s insistence that he defer $68M yearly. But I digress.

Naturally, that price tag factors in Ohtani’s status as a two-way player. With Ohtani arrives enviable efficiency: his team’s most potent hitter also slots into the starting rotation once per week. Filling those two roles with one passable guy would be impressive, but Ohtani fills both spots with superstar performance, leaving space for an extra asset or niche contributor. For roster construction alone, there’s no denying Ohtani’s appeal.

But this year, his first with the Dodgers, Ohtani hasn’t been that player. Last August, Shohei tore his Ulnar Collateral Ligament, forcing him to undergo Tommy John surgery. The operation traditionally requires an eighteen-month recovery, meaning his debut in blue has been on offense only: he serves as the team’s designated hitter while rehabbing and building up strength in his reconstructed UCL.

Despite effectively surrendering half of what makes him unique this spring, Ohtani has given his new squad elite value. Even after a ho-hum week by his standards, Ohtani leads the majors in hitting at .336—a league where .240 is average—while clubbing thirteen homers, stealing as many bases, and crushing pitchers to the tune of a 1.024 OPS. He’s in the top ten in almost every offensive category.

I’m not the only person to notice this shift from great to superlative in the boxscore; countless baseball writers are speculating as to why. Many credit the Dodgers’ organizational stability and coaching, while others point to the incredible lineup around him, in which former MVPs Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman force teams to attack Ohtani and pay for their inevitable mistakes.

A lot of writers have pointed to something simpler. Taking nothing away from the grueling rehab process for his elbow, Ohtani can focus on just one thing this year: hitting. Rather than spread himself thin and wear himself down grinding through the schedules of two players simultaneously, right now, he devotes his attention to one thing. Especially with him being older and more familiar with big league pitching than he was in 2019 under similar circumstances, Ohtani has the time and experience to truly thrive in one role. The extra energy and marginal minutes have unlocked a transcendent offensive force.

Which is crazy: the guy was already incredible at the plate while pitching. He’s won two MVPs for that work! And yet, in 2024, it seems that he could conceivably earn a third while playing with one arm stuck in a sling.

Shohei Ohtani blows my mind. I root hard against his teams, yet he’s my favorite active ballplayer, and it isn’t even close. Fascinated, I’ve followed Ohtani since he arrived in Anaheim, forever marveling at his ability to be one of the greatest while doing it all.

Still, that I’m watching him in 2024 be THE greatest at half-capacity leaves me with a question larger even than the 6-4 slugger himself:

Should Shohei be doing it all after all?

*****

Getting up at 2:00 am presents no problems on its own.

I used to sleep from midnight to 5:00 am on school nights without issue, and a night in bed from 9:00 pm to 2:00 am achieves identical rest to my original plan. Whether those extra three hours awake happen in the late evening or the darkest part of the night is a footnote health-wise.

By reversing the placement of those three hours, I have created a newfound efficiency in my life. Instead of writing assessments and rec letters while sluggish and exhausted, I write them when I’ve got a fresh stretch of rejuvenating sleep behind me. Those tasks no longer hang over me all day because I finish them before school even begins. I can put on a Taylor Swift album or my favorite radio station and create problems at a time when I’ve got the whole day ahead of me.

But that isn’t the real reason my alarm serenades me with Rachel Platten’s “Better Place” at 2:03 am on school days: I do it to ensure that time for me always has a place. That morning window is when I read, pop on a movie, or catch up on YouTube. That morning window is also when I walk from start to stretching inside my house and, most importantly, when I write everything I author: letters, newsletters, notes, and novels. I wrote around 500,000 words last year, and 95% of them I composed between 2:00 and 7:00 am.

My writing time, in particular, matters to me—it’s more than a creative outlet. To write is to reflect, to contemplate, and to contextualize. Writing is my self-administered therapy, that time when I take a critical lens to my life and past to make peace with both the highs and lows. I have no doubt my newfound sense of adulthood comes from this work, and I have less than zero doubt my sustained stretches of mental wellness since November exist thanks to the creative outlet I use for that purpose. Khaya calls my newsletter creative non-fiction, but even the creative fiction I’ve written transforms me. Therapy Thursday is brought to you by this time when I think, explore, and translate my own story daily.

With my old sleep schedule, this time for creativity arrived at the tail end of taxing days. Performing as an energetic, empathetic instructor takes a toll: I’m spent by the time I dry my dinner dishes. My battery dies after school days end, so I’ve struggled for years to produce quality thinking, let alone writing. As Alyiah often reminds me, “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” and at 9:00 pm, my glass sits bone dry on the counter. When the clock strikes twice, after a few good hours of earned sleep, I’m sipping up the liquid overflowing its sides. Getting up at 2:00 guarantees a window when I can process and grow that can’t exist at any other time.

Granted, that’s only true when I do sleep. And I don’t sleep—or I haven’t for a while now. When April arrived, so many things flooded my schedule that I had to lop off something. Unlike the old me, who wouldn’t hesitate to drop a personal project or exercise program to keep up with intensifying stress at school, I refused to relinquish my morning hours this spring. Those were mine, and I wasn’t going to punt them to get a few more hours of sleep.

So I didn’t. As more landed on my plate, I cut back on sleep, day after day. Whole weeks passed when I didn’t touch a four-hour average slumber; some weekends saw me inch my weekly averages up to less alarming levels, but many more saw me rising at 1:45 am to make room for extra time before Diamond Day, the Steeplechase, or a practice AP exam. I didn’t notice the tourniquet at first because I’d been so careful about switching off my lights between 8:30 and 9:00 in 2024, but then, two weeks into a month of self-destructive sleep deprivation, I felt the rubber band tightening around my brain and squeezing out oxygen like toothpaste from a tube.

I tried applying bandaids, napping daily and mimicking Jason Statham in Crank by keeping my heart pumping and adrenaline coursing, but the physical symptoms worsened. By mid-May, it took ninety minutes for the worst of them to fade into tolerability; while the headaches dissipated by 3:30 and the vibrations slowed their buzzing by my backup alarm at 4:01, the nausea rarely relented. I began chewing multiple sticks of gum to tide me until breakfast, even though I knew the futility: Watermelon Prism would only fool my stomach for a few hours before yielding to that merciless churn.

What I needed to do was go to bed earlier and retreat with a few unfinished tasks, but I hated that alternative. To stay up longer and finish something required a sacrifice, and I’ve long been a member of the “Sacrifice reveals priorities” club. To hunker down until 11:00 finishing the Hall of Fame cards, an interactive novel, or a new practice exam proves that I care, especially during stretches when I feel selfish for maintaining personal time when so much has to be done. I need that sacrifice to demonstrate my enduring affection. Trading one’s health for kindness speaks volumes.

I made the trade without fail until the very end. Running on fumes, I powered down without editing two classes’ video projects to keep something in the tank for the seniors’ last day. It was the right call, but I kept telling people I made it in hopes they would reinforce a decision I felt guilty about. (Good people that they were, they did.)

Final falter aside, I actually did have it all across those seven weeks from mid-April to late May. I achieved balance, carving out time for myself every single day. I executed some incredible things during that time, all while cooking my meals, writing and revising prolifically, and exercising extensively every day. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of myself.

But there was a cost. Oh boy, there was a cost. I fell asleep mid-problem while live streaming FRQs, I became sluggish and short-tempered on several occasions, I forgot plans and missed multiple deadlines, and, of course, I felt like shit every single day. I wasn’t as sharp of a teacher on a lesson-to-lesson basis as I could have been, and I wrote disjointedly, never satisfied with what I produced. Doing everything meant doing everything worse than if I had surrendered one for the other. I could have prioritized sleep and sold out for the final stretch at school or coasted there to write like I’m capable of. I might have.

But I didn’t. I kept doing everything, no matter how many hours it took. And all month long, I watched Shohei Ohtani rake, freed from the burden of his diverse talents, crushing the ball while concentrating on one thing and one thing only.

I should have had this conversation with myself in late April and early May. That’s when I needed it. Shohei’s average sparkled at .370 back then!

But I couldn’t read Ohtani’s box score line until 4:15. Not with my brain in a tourniquet.

*****

Shohei Ohtani would be a better hitter if all he did was hit. By all accounts, the man’s dedication to baseball and disciplined training program rival any player’s; were that time spent exclusively on one skill, it’s possible that this season’s offensive outburst could be the floor, not the ceiling, for what he’s capable of.

Pivoting from pitching would change the player Ohtani is, though. There’s something special about playing both ways. Nobody else does it! Yes, it costs him something, but don’t all good things? To abandon that impossible pursuit of excellence in both phases of the game would rob him of what makes him unique. The feat of strength that is firing fastballs while also crushing them defines Shohei Ohtani. Even though his divergent skills each suffer from that duality, he’s a superstar in either role. He’s one of one because he straddles both.

For as long as Ohtani wants to play both ways, I hope he does. The Dodgers will pay him $700M across the foreseeable future, so they deserve some say, but ultimately, he should be accountable to himself. It’s his body bearing the brunt of his ambition. He gets to make the call.

In this, I feel like Shohei Ohtani. I bristle when people suggest “fixes” like coasting on prior work, rebuffing requests, or writing on a less demanding schedule. For them, these are just things to do, items on a grocery list quickly skipped if Raley’s stocks a different brand. But for me, these are defining elements of self, justifications for existing, the dividing lines between mental health and emotional collapse. I loathe stress, but I thrive when my work reaches outward and flashes a level of detail and preparation that screams nothing if not “This matters to me,” a sentence that translates to “You matter to me.” That I do all of this defines me.

My seventh-grade Humanities teacher, Mr. Schmitt, once spoke at length about the Renaissance Man archetype during a lecture. He cited several examples—both men and woman, both ancient and modern—and he spoke of their abundant abilities as what set them apart. Individuals who stay in their lanes enact change, but we marvel at those whose reach is the widest. Needing slashes to describe what a person does champions them. Since Schmitt spoke, I’ve wanted to be one of those people: the coach in full uniform who sings the National Anthem. The fastidious math teacher who nurtures emotional awareness. The data junkie who writes with a boundless heart. The guy in a perpetual time crunch who nonetheless manages to eke out all of it. For all my admiration for Ohtani’s parallel powers, playing two ways marks only the floor for what I want. Screw duality; I crave multiplicity.

But Shohei Ohtani has a gourmet chef at his disposal. He has state-of-the-art training facilities, a bevy of experienced coaches, access to the world’s top surgeons, and near-unlimited financial resources to achieve his defining duality. He also treats sleep as essential:

Shohei Ohtani has long focused on maintaining good sleep habits; in 2022 he told Japanese news agency Kyodo News, “Sleep is my top priority.” He tries to get 10 hours at night, plus a two-hour nap before a game.

—Stephanie Apstein, SI.com

To maintain his ability to do it all, Ohtani goes all out on sleep, toting a custom mattress on road trips and owning special pillows to prevent neck stiffness. Some experts credit him for sneaking sleep hygiene into young athletes’ minds with his enduring advocacy for good rest. This is huge in Japan, a nation whose citizens, per the same article, average “seven hours and 22 minutes of sleep per day, the least among citizens of any of the 33 countries [the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] measured.”

As opposed to me. Over the last 33 days affected by school or a school event, I averaged four hours and two minutes of sleep. I had nights with as few as two hours; even on weekends, I never reached seven, let alone that national average across Japan. This wasn’t the first stretch like that during this school year; it won’t be my last in 2024.

For the first time, I wish it could be. Bria’s insisted for years that shirking sleep is unhealthy, but I never before suffered enough to believe her. I know the truth now; I have been damaging my body and mind for years. That tourniquet did not mince words; I could feel my brain breaking, the chainsaw of my shitty sleep schedule tearing my body apart for a few hours each day. I’m fortunate to have made it to summer without breaking down. I count it a blessing that the headaches and nausea are already fading; I’m lucky that the internal shaking subsided on Monday. I paid my bill, and now I’m free to leave.

Except something tells me that I’m not escaping unscathed. Just as Ohtani’s incredible feats of endurance undoubtedly contributed to the micro tears shredding his UCL, so too has my having-it-all surely diminished my neural abilities. Age plays a role, of course—I’m 38, whereas Shohei’s a month from turning 30—but if I’m honest, I already feel the destruction’s effects. Words slip out, memory lapses recur; I need post-it notes to hold onto tasks assigned five minutes prior. I’ve dulled my cognitive abilities, and I suspect I’ll be paying installments on the rest of this bill for the rest of my life.

When people say nobody can have it all, they’re as wrong as all the pundits who waved off Shohei Ohtani’s two-way potential in 2017. Some people choose to have it all and achieve it. If they work hard, they can absolutely put their hands on a little bit of everything they desire.

But there is a cost. None of us have Hermione Granger’s Time-Turner and only some of us have the medical access of an Ohtani or a LeBron, let alone the genes to maximize it. Most of us would-be Renaissance Persons trade our health, souls, and sanity to catch even a whiff of being all we’re capable of. Squeezing out every last drop is an act of violence.

Shohei gets $70M for the damage he inflicts on his body; I get to write this.

I love it, but sometimes it hurts.

---

I wrote two newsletters this week, but I scrapped the first one. This topic demanded I grapple with it now, whereas my other—about honorifics, Little Red Riding Hood, and Taylor Swift’s new song “loml”—lacked urgency. I’m glad I wrote this, even if I end it pretty sure that it won’t change my sleep habits when busy days arrive.

This next week brings my first-ever writing class, which excites and terrifies me in equal measure. But that’s a problem for future-me. For today, at least, I’m following Shohei’s lead and going to bed early.

Every minute matters, I hope.

PS: That’s a YouTube-ready thumbnail if I ever saw one. I actually used the Rule of Thirds!