This story was excerpted from Sonja Chen’s Dodgers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
If you've watched the Dodgers in the past week, chances are you've noticed a new celebration taking the team by storm.
After a home run or another big hit, the Dodgers pinch two fingers in front of their face, then move them laterally across their eye level, almost like a salute. Almost immediately, social media users picked up on the origin of the gesture.
"There's a good commercial out there about it," third baseman Max Muncy said.
The gesture comes from an ad campaign that Shohei Ohtani did with Decorté, a Japanese skincare and beauty company. In one now-viral spot, Ohtani is pictured holding a tube of product in front of his face and slowly moving it to the side, which is what he and his teammates are mimicking.
But not every Dodger knew why exactly the gesture was the new celebration of choice.
"Honestly, I don't really know why we're doing it," right fielder Teoscar Hernández said over the weekend. "We just say that it's because of Shohei, but I don't know. I didn't investigate why we're doing this. We're just trying to have fun and make everyone feel good."
Hernández is known for his own home run celebration, one that he has brought with him from team to team: throwing a handful of sunflower seeds at the player who hit the long ball. So the fact that he wasn't quite in the loop when it came to the origin of this latest move came as somewhat of a surprise.
Ask the Dodgers about it, and most of them will say the celebration comes from Ohtani -- which, of course it does, seeing as it's inspired by his commercial. But as it turns out, it quite literally did come from Ohtani, starting when he walked off the Braves on his bobblehead night to secure a historic 8-0 start to the Dodgers' title defense.
That night, as Dodger Stadium erupted with excitement after his game-winning solo shot, Ohtani rounded third base and made the now-ubiquitous gesture from his commercial in the direction of his teammates, who had clustered around home plate to greet him. In various states of revelry, his teammates returned the gesture, and thus the celebration was born.
Most of them put two and two together after a few repetitions. Others, like Hernández, needed to see the celebration and the commercial side by side to fully understand the connection.
"Well, Ohtani's got a lot of sponsorships," manager Dave Roberts said upon learning of the new celebration, "so I'm not aware of that one."
That might be the understatement of the century. While Ohtani is obviously a big deal in Major League Baseball, his superstardom hits another level in his home country, as the Dodgers saw when they were in Japan for last month's Tokyo Series.
In Tokyo, Ohtani's image is splashed all across the city, from billboards to convenience stores to vending machines. He's a celebrity figure whose reach goes far beyond the ballpark -- an echelon of fame that he might be on his way to in North America, although he has yet to fully ascend to that level outside of Japan.
Ohtani's Dodgers teammates got a taste of that when they were in Japan, and some of the more intriguing -- or bizarre -- ads he's featured in clearly caught their attention.
Although the Dodgers have the same goal as ever this season -- winning a World Series championship -- there's a different wrinkle to it, as they aspire to be the first team in more than two decades to successfully defend their title. So why not add a new celebration to the mix, especially one inspired by the player that many consider to be the best in the game right now?
"We figured we needed something new this year," utilityman Kiké Hernández said before Monday night's 6-4 loss to the Nationals, "so that's going to be the thing for now. We're 1-2 with it, so we might go back to doing what we did last year. We'll see how it goes."