If Disney Reviewed Shohei Ohtani’s Magical First Season with the Dodgers

With Shohei Ohtani having such a magical first season for the Dodgers, and now being so close to Hollywood, it’s undoubtedly only a matter of time before he gets his own inspirational Disney+ sports biopic. The only problem is, sometimes the truth is even stranger than fiction, and Ohtani’s current season might be a little too pitch-perfect even for the mouse house.

The following is a hypothetical list of notes and changes that Disney creative executives would most likely ask for to keep the cinematic version of Ohtani’s first Dodger season more believable and “on brand” for them:

Deferring $680 million dollars of his $700 million contract. We appreciate your efforts to endear Ohtani to viewers by having him defer $680 million dollars of his record-setting salary, but this is too good to be true for a major leaguer. Maybe as an alternative, consider a fun montage scene of him spending his new fortune in exciting ways, like by renting out Disneyland for his friends and teammates?

Betting scandal/Ippei Mizuhara’s arrest. We like our lead character’s “all is lost” moment to come closer to the end of act two, not right at the beginning of the film. It’s a bit jarring and confusing for this to come up right after he signs his new contract.

Also, we prefer our villains not to be the lead character’s best friend (we don’t want kids watching at home to think their own best friends are villains).

And it lacks believability that Ohtani’s best friend would jeopardize his coveted translator job just to feed his gambling habit. Maybe consider a sleazy agent (a Jay Mohr type) as the thief instead?

See-through uniforms. We appreciate the attempt to spice things up and add a hilarious early set piece to the film, but this crosses a line for us — please just have the players wear normal uniforms that aren’t so revealing. This would threaten our numerous sponsorship deals with Nike and Fanatics, who would be mortified and forever tarnished by a blunder like this.

Ohtani’s love interest. We love that you’ve introduced a love interest for Ohtani (this will help get eyeballs from our 18-49 year old female demographic), but she shouldn’t just appear out of nowhere like this. We can’t go from never hearing about her to suddenly finding out she and Ohtani are married.

Let’s have a “meet cute” moment, followed by a slow, romantic build to their relationship. Also, when Shohei announces they’re married for the first time, can he please call his wife something more romantic than “an ordinary Japanese person“? Let’s give them both adorable pet names for each other!

Batting first in lineup. When Ohtani’s teammate Mookie Betts gets injured and Ohtani switches to hitting leadoff, let’s give him a bit of a learning curve. Not believable that he would instantly be great at it and somehow even better than he was hitting second in the lineup. Let’s push ourselves as writers to top this!

Joining the 40-40 club. It’s fine if you want to have Ohtani join Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano, and Ronald Acuña Jr. in the exclusive 40 home run, 40 stolen base club, but does he really have to get there 21 games before anyone else ever has? And if you insist on keeping this detail, it really stretches credulity that his 40th home run would come on a walk-off grand slam. Let’s try to keep our lead character grounded and relatable — he comes off as far too super-human here.

The prospect of joining the 50-50 club? We love the tease you’ve put in for an even bigger accomplishment down the road, but no one in the history of baseball has had 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season. That’s as crazy as suggesting there are actual angels in the outfield. Oh whoops, actually we’ve done that too, but hopefully you understand the note.

We hope you take these notes to heart and can turn around the next draft quickly, as we’d like to premiere Only in LA: The Shohei Ohtani Story on Disney+, along with Air Bud 26, by the holidays.