Stephen A. Smith Under Fire for Complaining That MLB Star Shohei Ohtani Doesn’t Speak English

Shohei Ohtani is changing Major League Baseball as the two-way player they needed to bring relevancy to the sport. He can hit bombs and strike opposing batters out in a way that makes Babe Ruth his only relatable comp.

As baseball fans marvel at his skills on a nightly basis, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith is wondering why the Japanese-born superstar won’t speak English during interviews.

“I understand that baseball is an international sport itself in terms of participation,” Smith said Monday on First Take. “But when you talk about an audience, gravitating to the tube, or to the ballpark, I don’t think it helps that the number one face, is a dude that needs an interpreter so you can understand what the hell he’s saying, in THIS COUNTRY!”

“In other sports like basketball, Dirk Nowitzki was German and Manu Ginobili and others were from other places, and guess what, they spoke fluent English,” Smith added. “You understood what they were saying when somebody was interviewing them. They didn’t need an interpreter…for some reason with Major League Baseball, you got these guys that need those interpreters.”

Smith also cited the 1998 home run chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, which helped revive MLB after a collective bargaining dispute cancelled the World Series four years prior.

“Mark McGwire basically helped save baseball,” Smith said. “Because you had a dude that you could put on Wheaties boxes, that could ingratiate himself with the younger generations out there and had America transfixed on the sport.”

Despite being from the Dominican Republic and learning English as a second language, Sosa was beloved by baseball fans in the late ’90s, as were his “Slammin Sammy’s Frosted Flakes.”

Watch above via, ESPN