Today, Shohei Ohtani is recognized as a one-of-a-kind player in Major League Baseball, capable of excelling both as a pitcher and a hitter. However, this was not a future he clearly envisioned when he first started playing baseball.

Although Ohtani loved both hitting and pitching, the Los Angeles Dodgers scout who followed him closely during his high school years evaluated him primarily as a pitcher. Likewise, Hiroshi Sasaki, the manager of Hanamaki Higashi High School, initially planned to develop Ohtani as a pitcher.

That plan changed when injuries temporarily prevented Ohtani from pitching. During that time, he focused more on batting, and his hitting ability grew rapidly. Later, after he joined the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, manager Hideki Kuriyama proposed an unprecedented idea: allowing Ohtani to pursue a two-way career as both pitcher and hitter.

In other words, even Ohtani himself had not fully imagined becoming a two-way player. Yet because he genuinely loved both pitching and hitting—and continued practicing both—his talents gradually emerged.

The same can be said of his pursuit of throwing 160 kilometers per hour in high school, and his decision to challenge two-way play as a professional. From a conventional standpoint, both seemed unrealistic. Ohtani admits that he, too, sometimes felt they might be impossible.

Still, he did not stop trying.

According to Ohtani, every person carries countless possibilities they do not yet understand. Those possibilities do not reveal themselves by giving up at the first sign of difficulty. They emerge only when one chooses to try—even when success feels uncertain.

Source

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

Baseball Chronicle II: MLB Years 2018–2024 – Long Interview, p.88