This story was excerpted from Rhett Bollinger’s Angels Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And ...

A version of this story originally appeared on MiLB.com in 2006. We present it here once more as Minor League Baseball celebrates Black History Month with stories of Black baseball pioneers.

Although Ohtani is off to a superb start to a season with no analogue in the past baseball century, he has walked 19 batters in his four mound appearances. Ohtani has fully emerged as one of the ...