The mystery behind Shohei Ohtani’s dog’s identity has been solved.
The Los Angeles Dodgers rolled out their $700 million superstar acquisition Thursday afternoon and in a 20-minute press conference, perhaps no question was quite so burning as the name of the beagle who crawled on Ohtani’s lap during a televised announcement of his American League MVP award last month.
And the name is?
Decoy.
It is an appropriate tag for a hound and his human, whose identity and destination remained shrouded in secrecy for the last month. And Ohtani, always pleasant but famously private, was far more forthcoming about his beagle (or beagle-like specimen) than he was about, say, the nature of his elbow reconstruction surgery in September.
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Decoy was the name the dog came with, Ohtani said, but he decided to give him a similar-sounding Japanese handle, dekopin.
According to online language translation, dekopin means, ‘the act of flicking someone’s forehead with a finger.’ Naturally, intrepid Reddit users surfaced a video of Ohtani doing a little bit of that dekopin to Patrick Sandoval on the Angels bench between innings.
OK, then! Just another explanation for the Ohtani-crazed media to pursue.
And perhaps the Dodgers now have their new home run celebration.