There’s a common saying: “Luck is part of skill.”

Even when you have the ability, results don’t always follow.
And at times, luck can lift your performance beyond what your ability alone would produce.

In 2022, Shohei Ohtani recorded 15 wins as a pitcher and hit 34 home runs as a batter.
Although Aaron Judge ultimately won the MVP that year, Ohtani’s performance was strong enough to make a back-to-back MVP entirely plausible.

However, at the start of the season, he struggled to collect wins, and home runs were hard to come by.
After hitting over 40 the previous year, many around him began to say he was “out of form.”

But Ohtani saw it differently.

During that stretch, he chose to think of his batting as being affected by bad luck.

At the time, teams often employed the now-banned “Ohtani shift,” heavily stacking fielders on one side.
As a result, well-struck balls frequently went straight to defenders, and hard line drives were turned into outs.

If even half of those balls had fallen for hits, he likely would have felt more comfortable at the plate—and the home runs would have come.

But they didn’t.

In those moments, Ohtani protected his approach by telling himself:
“I’m in good form—it’s just bad luck.”

By separating performance from results, he avoided disrupting his mechanics and mindset.

Eventually, as he put it, things “evened out,” and his numbers rose to reflect his true level.

Source

This quote comes from a Japanese book published in Japan and is not currently available in English.

Baseball Youth II: MLB Edition 2018–2024 – Shohei Ohtani Long Interview, p.215