Skenes Goes to Japan to Learn Ohtani's Sleep Secrets

During the 2026 offseason, Paul Skenes flew to Tokyo and walked into the Nihonbashi Nishikawa flagship store — a bedding institution with more than 450 years of history and the maker of Shohei Ohtani’s famous custom mattress, which runs around $3,000. The context makes the trip easy to understand: the Pittsburgh Pirates ace just closed his first season with an ERA above 3.00, posting a 3.82 mark after winning the 2025 NL Cy Young with a 1.97 ERA. He’s clearly not sitting still about it.

Why Ohtani, Specifically

Skenes didn’t stumble onto this store by accident. Shohei Ohtani has had a long-standing relationship with Nishikawa — over a decade of using their sleep technology, including a mattress built from a full-body 3D scan and a portable version he brings on road trips. Ohtani sleeps roughly 12 hours a day — 10 hours overnight plus a two-hour nap before games — and doesn’t use an alarm clock.

For Skenes, who is 23 years old and already owns two individual awards (2024 NL Rookie of the Year, 2025 NL Cy Young), Ohtani represents something specific: not the talent — Skenes has that — but the system. The recovery discipline. The marginal gains.

According to reports from specialized outlets citing @DodgersNation, Skenes’s visit to the COREDO Nihonbashi complex included a full body evaluation and the custom fabrication of bedding and a pillow. Note: the original tweet cited is truncated and the attribution passes through an intermediate source, so the 3D scan detail should be treated as reported, not confirmed.

A Season That Demands Answers

There’s one number that explains this trip better than any statement: 96.8 mph. That was Skenes’s average four-seam fastball velocity in 2026 — down 1.4 mph from the 98.2 mph he averaged in 2025. His Stuff+ (a metric measuring pitch arsenal quality against league average, where 100 is average) dropped from 110 to 99 in the same stretch.

The results on the mound: a 10-11 record, 3.82 ERA, and 1.12 WHIP across 32 starts. Solid numbers for a league-average starter — not for the pitcher who, in his first 25 career starts, became the only pitcher since ERA became an official stat in 1913 to combine a sub-2.00 ERA with at least 175 strikeouts.

There’s a reading that softens the diagnosis: his xERA of 3.30 — what his ERA should have been based on contact quality allowed — sat nearly a full run below his actual mark. Statcast suggests Pittsburgh’s defense amplified some of the damage. But the velocity drop is real, and Skenes knows it.

Japanese Biohacking as Elite Standard

Skenes’s move doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Japan’s sleep industry has built technology — smart mattresses, recovery garments with specialized fibers, postural scanners — that athletes worldwide are adopting with increasing seriousness. Nishikawa is the most visible name in that ecosystem within baseball, with Ohtani as its de facto ambassador.

The fact that the youngest pitcher to win the Cy Young in the modern era is following that path during his first disappointing offseason says something about where the sport is heading: recovery isn’t rest anymore — it’s a protocol. And the best pitchers in the majors are willing to cross the Pacific to find the edge.

The trip wasn’t purely biohacking, either. Skenes and his girlfriend, former gymnast Olivia Dunne, toured Tokyo and Kyoto, and Skenes completed a USO tour of three American military bases in Japan — Misawa, Yokosuka, and Yokota — between October 22 and 24. The sleep chapter just happened to grab all the headlines.