What on Earth is a Shobae?
Inside the social media-driven Shohei Ohtani superfan community
AP Photo/Ashley Landis
Dodgers superstar and World Series Champion Shohei Ohtani is a thoroughly unique ballplayer, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that he has a thoroughly unique fanbase. Like other baseball superstars, Shohei Ohtani has fans who chase after his autos in special release packs, obsess over his stats, and love what he’s brought to Major League Baseball.
He also has the Shobaes.
I first heard about the Shobaes when prominent (and possibly first) Shobae Portia (known on Twitter as @Shoheisaveus) was interviewed by Ben Lindbergh on the Effectively Wild podcast. In an era in which talk about the future of baseball often centers around the fact that not a lot of young people (or non-white people) are being introduced to the American pastime, the Shobaes may be a tiny window into a new type of fan that MLB has not really had in mind. To get more insight into this phenomenon, I reached out to Portia myself for a chat.
Here’s what I learned about the life of a Shobae.
What is a Shobae?
Portia is a Shohei Ohtani super fan, though she isn’t the kind of super fan that we normally see in baseball. Baseball super fans tend to memorize stats, wear jerseys, and debate hotly over why Their Guy is better than Your Guy. Shobaes are a little different. They follow Shohei Ohtani’s entire life — not just his baseball skills. They pore over every interview, obsess over magazine photoshoots, and freak out over the announcement that he has adopted a dog (and speculate over the possible meanings of said dog’s name). In other words, the Shobaes treat Shohei Ohtani not as a baseball player, but as a lifestyle.
If you need a popular comparison, take a look at Taylor Swift’s “Swifties,” who aren’t just folks who enjoy listening to Taylor Swift’s music. They make up an international subculture who strategize across continents to promote Swift's work, call for boycotts, and engage in her Easter-egg laden musical "universe." They are highly organized and extraordinarily invested in Swift's life, tours, and music, to the point of generating measurable political and economic impact.
While the Shobaes haven't hit the saturation level of the Swifties, their love for and obsession with Shohei Ohtani reach the same levels of intensity towards their chosen idol.
How did the Shobaes begin?
Portia wasn’t always a baseball fan. While she had watched baseball from time to time, it had never been a serious interest. It wasn’t until Shohei Ohtani that things changed. Portia recalls seeing a clip on Twitter of Ohtani’s MLB debut in 2018. “First at bat, first swing. I was like whoa,’” she says. “Here's a young Japanese player in the MLB, and he looks cute.”
Portia decided to watch Ohtani’s next game a couple days later and was shocked to find that he was now on the pitcher’s mound. A hitter and a pitcher? This was getting interesting. She took to Twitter to see what other people were saying about Ohtani and found social media lacking in the kind of fandom content she wanted to see. “When I started, there was nothing really,” Portia explains. “Everyone was just talking about stats, and everyone would just post normal photos of him that don't even show how good looking he is.”
Portia was determined to fill this void. She did so by sharing videos that she pulled not from official MLB channels but from Japanese channels which focused solely on Ohtani. She found photos of Ohtani that highlighted his looks and researched his magazine appearances and sponsorships. During this time, she spent a whopping six hours a day creating Shohei Ohtani content.
At first, Portia felt like she was posting into the void, but soon, others began to show up and engage with her content — and make content of their own. Now, Portia’s account has 167k followers, and there are a lot more Shobaes, whose fandom stretches beyond the baseball field to making videos, photo edits, and fan art. They've become a community, with many participating in large group chats and livestreams discussing the newest Ohtani-related tidbits.
Portia says the split between typical baseball fans and the “stans” is apparent in the content that people create. “We do a lot of funny captions and silly stuff about him. We would edit his photos and add little hearts.” She mentions a particular Twitter account dedicated to cropped photos of Shohei Ohtani’s backside. Suffice to say, the regular baseball fan is not as interested in Shohei Ohtani’s backside as that devout poster is.
For anyone who is assuming that fans like Portia just like to look at photos of Ohtani and ignore the baseball aspects of his fame, that's not entirely true. While there are certainly Shobaes out there who are in it solely for the cheeky backside photos, for Portia, ignoring Ohtani’s baseball skills would be as absurd as ignoring his looks. She keeps up to date with the stats and standings of all MLB teams, and she watches virtually every Ohtani game, claiming to have missed fewer than fifty games over the past six years.
Where does Shobae culture come from?
According to Portia, many of the Shobaes are young women, primarily Asian, though there are a lot of Latina fans and South American fans as well. As for why these young fans, many of whom had not previously been baseball fans, have chosen Shohei Ohtani of all people to stan, Portia guesses, “I think he has that [magnetism]. Most of them are K-Pop fans, and a lot of them are young. They've never watched baseball before. It's quite refreshing, because we learned a lot about baseball because of Shohei. It's such a great sport.”
I wasn’t surprised to learn that a lot of the Shobaes were also K-Pop fans. The type of fan engagement, from the edits and fan-made merchandise seemed almost identical to what I had seen previously from fans of K-Pop, down to Portia mentioning that Shobaes organize “group buys” of baseball cards and magazines. (Group buys, which are very popular in the K-Pop world, allow for groups of fans in one country to chip in and buy one large package to split the burden of international shipping costs.)
Even in the cut-throat world of pop-star fandom, K-pop fans are in their own league. Imagine the most passionate Swiftie culture shaped by record labels into a mass-market product placed across multiple music groups and centered around individual “idols.” In K-pop, idols are highly controlled and curated “wholesome” performers who maintain strict public images and have a very controlled interaction with fans through livestreams and meetups. These idols are not allowed to get married, often not allowed to date, and are certainly not allowed to share aspects of their private lives that might alienate fans.
This system creates a specific kind of parasocial relationship between the fan and their chosen idol. Every idol is a potential romantic partner, because none of them date. Each is a perfect romantic friend or match, because they never share opinions that may counter those of their fans. While this may seem like a one-way relationship, the relationships aren’t passive. Beyond the conventional expressions of fandom, like going to concerts and buying merchandise, K-Pop fans will band together to buy subway billboards to support their favorite idols and even take time to stream their idol’s music on different sites to boost streaming numbers. The nicer side of this group behavior includes raising money for an idol’s favorite charity — the worse side can lead to stalking and threats against the idol or other idols.
This kind of high-intensity environment, directed at a baseball player who isn’t controlled by an “idol” system, creates a conflict of sorts. Shohei Ohtani, while keeping a fairly controlled private life, doesn't have a label-produced public persona to feed to his fans. This conflict between the idol-expectant fans and their love for a non-idol probably explains why it was so shocking to the Shobaes when Ohtani announced that he had gotten married.
While Shohei Ohtani’s marriage to Mamiko Tanaka made the front page of every baseball news site, it hit the Shobaes hard. “Everyone had a meltdown. Oh man, that was crazy,” Portia says. Some Shobaes announced that they would leave their Shohei love behind. Some cried. According to Portia, the intensity of the Shobaes’ reaction to Ohtani’s marriage shocked the more “regular” baseball fans. But for her, this kind of deep passion for the whole of a celebrity is part and parcel of this type of fan culture.
Love beyond team loyalty
Shohei Ohtani’s marriage was not the only bump in the road for the Shobaes. Ohtani spent the first six years of his MLB career with the Los Angeles Angels, making many of his fans also Angels fans. But as he ticked towards free agency, worries about where he would land were prominent in Shobae spaces, according to Portia. When Ohtani chose to sign onto the very expensive, superstar-studded roster of the Los Angeles Dodgers, there was "big heartbreak.”
But just because Ohtani joined the oft-hated Los Angeles Dodgers and broke lots of hearts doing so, his appeal still rises above team loyalty. As Portia says, “Even if he's playing for the Dodgers. you can't hate him, you'll still like Shohei.” Those words seem to echo the more traditional baseball fanbase’s thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s general likeability. Like many widely likeable stars of the past, Ohtani transcends team rivalries to stand alone as a baseball and — as the Shobaes prove — cultural star.
In this way, Ohtani has become the focus of many different types of fans. Baseball fans look at him as a once-in-a-lifetime player, Japanese fans regard him as a representation of their country, Los Angelinos paint murals of him in Little Tokyo. Shobaes shape their lives around him.
And though there has been innovation in bringing stan culture to baseball through this growing interest in Ohtani, according to Portia, this sort of fandom hasn’t yet been directed at other ballplayers. At least, not to the Shobae levels. “They don't stan one player at all,” Portia shares, “It's not even close to the level that we do with Shohei. I'm not trying to be arrogant, but ours is on a different level.”
