The Most Overlooked Market In Sneakers
The line from Hideo Nomo’s first signature to Ohtani’s record-chasing cleats is the proof.
August 5th, 1995. One day after my birthday.
I was a kid in the back of my grandparents’ Oldsmobile, headed from Sacramento to San Francisco with my dad and my grandparents for a Giants game. That drive is normally ninety minutes, maybe two hours if the traffic on the way into the city decides to be difficult. We left early on purpose, because the plan was to make a whole day of it. Walk around, eat too much, be tourists in our own backyard before first pitch.
It was around 11:30 in the morning, somewhere near Fisherman’s Wharf, when we realized the tickets were sitting on the dining room table back in Sacramento.
My dad didn’t say much. He just got the keys, left the three of us at the Wharf, climbed back into that Oldsmobile, and drove all the way home and all the way back to get them. If you’ve made that drive, you know what that means. Hours. A whole day’s worth of patience spent on an empty freeway so the rest of us could see a game. I think about that more now than I did then. Any story about my dad that happens to take place at a baseball stadium is usually the one worth keeping.
We finally got to our seats around the third or fourth inning, and the place was electric. Deafening, even. Except the crowd at a Giants game was not losing its mind for the Giants.
They were losing it for a rookie pitcher on the Los Angeles Dodgers named Hideo Nomo.
If that name doesn’t ring a bell, that is part of the point. For a few impossible months in the summer of 1995, Hideo Nomo was the most electric thing in American sports. A Japanese rookie who had crossed an ocean, thrown a pitch nobody could hit, and made a country that had never really watched Japanese baseball stop and pay attention. He was the story of that season, and thirty years later most people have let the name slip. Hold onto that. It matters later.
If you were watching baseball in the summer of 1995, you remember the windup. Nobody moved like that. The full turn away from the plate, the pause, the hands over the head, that corkscrew coil the announcers started calling “the Tornado.” I had never seen anything like it, and I was a kid who pitched, who studied pitchers, who thought he knew what a delivery was supposed to look like. I remember reading somewhere that Nomo used to tape a tennis ball between his fingers at night to train the grip on his forkball. I was busy that same summer trying to perfect a split-finger fastball of my own, and that little detail lodged itself in my brain forever. It made him mythic. It made the whole thing feel like something you could chase.
That afternoon, Nomo threw a one-hitter. One hit. The Dodgers won 3 to 0 at Candlestick Park and the home crowd barely pretended to be upset about it. I was too busy being in awe to care about the final score that day.
I remember something else, too, the way sneaker people always do. Royce Clayton, the Giants’ shortstop, was wearing the Nike Air Diamond Fury. Unmistakable shoe. One of the best baseball cleats Nike has ever made, and one that is still, thirty years later, sitting near the top of my personal bucket list. Funny what the mind decides to hold onto. A one-hitter, my dad’s four-hour rescue mission, and a shortstop’s cleats.
I didn’t have the language for it then. But something got planted at Candlestick that day. A player had crossed an ocean and made an entire stadium forget which team it came to see. And within a year, that same player would have his own shoe.
Thirty years later, I found myself looking at photographs of another Japanese player’s cleats, and all of it came rushing back at once.
The shoe is the part that connects the two ends of this story.
Nomo was not the first Japanese player to reach the Major Leagues. That was Masanori Murakami, a relief pitcher who debuted in 1964, and who, in one of those coincidences that makes you believe stories rhyme, did it in a San Francisco Giants uniform. But after Murakami went home, the door effectively closed for thirty years. No Japanese player followed. When Nomo arrived in 1995 and set off what the country started calling Nomomania, he wasn’t just a great rookie. He was proof the door could open again, and this time stay open.
So when Nike gave him a signature shoe in 1996, the Air Max Nomo, it was not a small thing. Understand what a signature shoe means in that era. It means the culture has decided you are not a novelty. It means somebody in Beaverton looked at a player and said, this person is worth building around, worth putting a name on, worth asking a kid to want. In baseball at that moment, the only shoe that carried more weight was Ken Griffey Jr.’s Air Griffey Max 1, also 1996, which is about as high a shelf as footwear gets. And for a Japanese player in the big leagues, there was nothing more important. Nothing close.
The Air Max Nomo line was short-lived. It only got the retro treatment once, never became a resale obsession, and lives now mostly as a quiet favorite among people who were paying attention. But it said the thing out loud in 1996 that the sport had spent thirty years not saying. A Japanese star belonged, and belonged enough to sell shoes on his name.
Now walk with me to the other end.
Baseball has been waiting for the right player for years. I said as much to Footwear News a while back, a sport this global with no single face to carry it into sneaker culture the way basketball has had a dozen. It turned out he had already arrived.
Shohei Ohtani is not a promising rookie. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to argue he is not, at this moment, the best player in the world, and it isn’t especially close. He does two things at the highest level that the sport had quietly agreed were impossible to do at once.
Where Nomo was theater, Ohtani is restraint. Nomo was out of this world to watch, that corkscrew windup an event unto itself, a pitcher who made you lean forward whether or not you understood what you were seeing. Ohtani barely gives you a flourish. The delivery is quiet, almost businesslike. And he is the better pitcher of the two by a real distance... then he sets the bat on his shoulder and out-hits nearly everyone in the league on top of it. Nomo made a stadium watch him. Ohtani makes a stadium wonder whether what it’s seeing is even allowed. And New Balance, a brand that a decade ago you would not have called a baseball company at all, built its entire march into premium baseball around him. His signature line, the Ohtani 1, arrived in 2024 with details pulled straight from Japanese ballpark architecture. Not a novelty. The gold standard, and marketed as exactly that.
Then came the moment the whole line was quietly built toward. The 2025 Tokyo Series, big-league baseball played in Japan, at the Tokyo Dome, which is, without any exaggeration from me, the greatest place I have ever watched this game in my life. And I get to watch my Giants play at the most beautiful setting in baseball, but the Tokyo Dome… it’s on another level.
The fans in Japan are the most enthusiastic, contagiously fun crowd I have ever stood in the middle of, in any sport, anywhere. Ohtani came home. And he came home in a special kanji-marked pair of his own cleats, worn in front of the country that produced him. More than 25 million people in Japan watched the opener, the most-watched MLB broadcast in the country’s history. Even Ohtani admitted afterward he had not felt that nervous on a baseball field in years. Then he settled in. The next night he homered, his first of the season, into a Tokyo Dome that came apart at the seams. And a few days before any of it counted, in an exhibition at that same Dome, he had already launched one against the Yomiuri Giants, the team on the hat I may or may not be wearing as I write this. The best player in the world, home, in a pair of shoes made for him.
Those game-used shoes are up for auction right now at The Realest, signed, and as I write this the bidding has already cleared seventy-three thousand dollars with more than three weeks still on the clock. By the time you read this, it will be higher. Probably a lot higher. Looking at them is what sent me back to Candlestick in the first place.
Here is the distance I want you to feel. Nomo’s shoe was a short run that only last two shoes, a collector’s whisper, a marker that the door had reopened. Ohtani’s homecoming cleats might become the most valuable baseball footwear ever sold. And rightfully so. That gap, from a niche training shoe in 1996 to a record-chasing game-worn artifact in 2025, is not really a story about two pairs of shoes. It’s a measure of how far the sport, and the culture around it, traveled in thirty years on the strength of Japanese players who kept proving they belonged. Nomo made Ichiro thinkable. Ichiro made Hideki Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka ordinary, and behind them came a whole generation: Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, Kenta Maeda, Koji Uehara, Seiya Suzuki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and the countless others whose names haven’t made it into our feeds, a lineage that keeps getting longer. Each one made the next one a little less of a gamble than the last. And all of it made Ohtani, the two-way impossibility, feel less like a miracle and more like the place this road was always heading.
If you want my bet on where this business has the most room left to grow, it’s here. Baseball. Not basketball, which is already saturated and picked clean. Baseball is the most underrated corner of the entire sneaker world, and it has been for a long time. There are more players getting custom cleats made right now than at any point in the sport’s history, one-of-one pairs with personal stories stitched into them every week of the season, and the sneaker community has mostly not caught on yet. That gap is the whole opportunity. Basketball learned decades ago that a shoe is a story you can hold in your hands. Baseball is sitting on a closet full of those stories and almost nobody has come asking. I cannot wait until they do, because of exactly what’s attached to this pair of New Balance.
And it is already starting, if you are watching. When the Dodgers, Converse, and Undefeated put out a Chuck 70 collaboration this year, one of the pairs was built around Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and MLB.com came to me to talk about what it meant. That is the tell. When a league starts calling sneaker people to explain its own shoes, the category is waking up. Every big baseball moment is a branding opportunity sitting in plain sight, something I keep coming back to, and baseball has more of those moments, with less competition for them, than anywhere else in sneakers right now.
It was never really about the shoes. It was about a kid in the third-base seats at Candlestick, realizing a person could cross an ocean and make a stadium roar for the wrong team. Nomo did that in front of me once. Ohtani does it now on a scale Nomo is a big reason we can even imagine. The signature shoe is just the receipt. It’s how the culture writes down that it noticed, that it cared, that it was here for this.
I got to that game late, in the fourth inning, because the tickets were on a dining room table two hours away and my dad decided none of that was going to stop us. We still made it for the part that mattered. I’ve come to think that’s most of what preserving this stuff is. You show up however late, you hold onto what you can, you make sure the moment gets written down somewhere it can’t be erased.
I’m still chasing that Air Diamond Fury, by the way. Some bucket-list items are meant to stay on the list a while. But I’ve got the photos of Ohtani’s cleats in front of me, thirty years after a rookie in Dodger blue made a Giants crowd forget itself, and I’m 15 years old again, split-finger grip and all.
Keep building.
-Nick
I’m Nick Engvall. I’ve worked in the sneaker industry for over two decades. I built the original Eastbay Blog during my time at Sole Collector, led the first dedicated sneaker team for Complex, led the first UGC and seeding programs for Finish Line, employee #9 at StockX, and much more. Now, I run Sneaker History and host the Sneaker History podcast, with over 600K downloads.
I couldn’t do this independent work without the readers who pay for it. If supporting independent thinking in the sneaker world is worth a few dollars a month to you...
Paid subscribers get the deeper proprietary analysis, the long retrospectives that tie sneaker history to where the market is heading next, and full access to the archive.