Shohei Ohtani is one of the top physical specimens in Major League Baseball right now, but even he cannot match up to basketball center height.
A wild photo went viral this week of the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Ohtani posing with former professional basketball player Mamadou Ndiaye. Standing at 7-foot-6, Ndiaye visited the Dodgers at spring training in Phoenix, Ariz. and got to meet up with Ohtani.
Though Ohtani is a big dude at 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds, he looked like a child compared to Ndiaye. Take a look.
Ndiaye, 31, made a name for himself in college at the University of California, Irvine. He played there from 2013-16 and was at one point the single tallest player in NCAA Division I (before Tacko Fall, then of the University of Central Florida, matched Ndiaye in 2015 at 7-foot-6). Some of the visuals of Ndiaye in college were even crazier than the one above with Ohtani.
Ultimately, Ndiaye was not selected in the 2016 NBA Draft. But he did go on to play professionally for a couple of seasons in Mexico (for Fuerza Regia de Monterrey and then for Correcaminos UAT Victoria of Mexico’s Liga Nacional de Baloncesto Profesional, also known as LNBP).
As for Ohtani, now a World Series champion as well as the reigning National League MVP, it is definitely not every day that he looks small in comparison to another athlete. But Ohtani did recently meet up with another basketball player, this one female, who made him look relatively normal-sized.
