Is Shohei Ohtani the world’s greatest athlete?
Oliver Bateman
As opening day approaches, fans can expect many changes in MLB — new rules that ban the defensive shift that has driven batting averages to new lows, implement a pitch clock mandating that pitchers have 15 seconds to throw a pitch with the bases empty and 20 seconds with a runner on base, reduce the number of pickoffs a pitcher can use to keep runners close to the bases, and increase the size of bases from 15 to 18 inches to encourage stolen bases. Amid all this change, there is one constant: 28-year-old Los Angeles Angels player Shohei Ohtani will be among the best pitchers and the best hitters in the league.
While many will struggle to adjust to the most extensive overhaul of league rules since the introduction of the designated hitter to the American League in 1973 — as of 2022, both leagues now use DHs — Ohtani has a trump card. Very nearly as good a hitter and base runner as he is a pitcher, whatever Ohtani loses at the pitcher’s mound will be regained at the plate or rounding the bases. This is, after all, an athlete who can throw a 102 mph fastball, hit a ball 119 mph, and reach a max sprint speed of 19.8 mph.
With Ohtani, who this week is preparing to lead Japan to yet another World Baseball Classic victory over the likes of the United States and Cuba — it has already won the WBC twice, more times than any other country — one simply cannot stop with the superlatives. He is the greatest all-around baseball player Japan has ever produced, the kind of once-in-a-century performer that baseball-mad country has been trying to develop since visitors from the U.S. introduced the sport at the beginning of the Meiji era. He is the greatest two-way player in the history of baseball, including Babe Ruth, who had a pair of solid pitching-and-hitting years in 1918 and 1919 before leaving the mound to focus on swatting home runs. Ohtani blows Babe’s two-way numbers out of the water, particularly on the mound, and he is doing so with a “live” ball rather than a “dead” one in a league that is not only integrated but full of players from all around the world. He is arguably the greatest active athlete in any sport: Imagine Argentine footballer Lionel Messi if he played as both forward and keeper or quarterback Patrick Mahomes if he also started in the defensive secondary and you’re on the way to understanding the extent of what Ohtani has already accomplished.
This is rarefied air for sports-obsessed Japan, a country that once came close to producing the world’s finest athlete — the massively muscled sumo Chiyonofuji, who reigned as yokozuna for a decade from 1981 to 1991 and physically outclassed contemporaries in nearly all of the strength-oriented sports, from football to freestyle wrestling — and that can reasonably claim to have produced baseball’s best singles hitter, the metronomic Ichiro Suzuki, who set MLB’s single-season record for hits, 262, and, between stints in MLB and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league, also holds the all-time career hits record, 4,367. But Japan, a country that either sharpens its most promising athletes to a fine point with excessive practice or, more commonly, destroys their bodies with overtraining, has never produced a perfect natural athlete: No Usain Bolt, Bruce Jenner, Michael Phelps, or LeBron James has arisen from that archipelago. Until Ohtani, that is. Ohtani changed everything.
Robert Whiting, an American sportswriter who spent most of his career in Japan, summarized the Japanese mania for practice in You Gotta Have Wa, a masterly account of baseball in the land of the rising sun: “In the U.S. we believe that a player has a certain amount of natural ability and with practice he reaches a certain peak point … but the Japanese believe there is no peak point. They don’t recognize limits.” Most of the time, this results in burnout — pitchers’ arms destroyed by too many practice throws, batters’ wrists and elbows ruined by too many practice swings, sprinters’ legs degraded by too many practice laps. Occasionally, however, you get performers like Yoshihide Kiryu, Ryota Yamagata, and Yuki Koike, three of the only nonblack sprinters in the history of the world to break 10 seconds in the 100-meter dash. Much more populous China, by comparison, has two. Or take Suzuki, who was a flawless if limited baseballer, a highly specialized player who excelled at slap-hitting baseballs and chasing them down in the field. Never has Japan given us a stupor mundi, a wonder of the world, on the order of Ohtani, whose mother still manages his finances and pays him a monthly allowance so he can spend every waking moment focused on baseball.
No one has ever hit 46 home runs and struck out 156 batters in a season. Ohtani did in 2021. No one has ever hit 34 home runs and struck out 219 batters in a season. Ohtani did in 2022. No one will ever do either of these things again — unless Ohtani does them in 2023. And when Ohtani hits the free agent market after the conclusion of the season, he will likely be paid both as one of the best hitters and one of the best pitchers in baseball. He could very well be the first player paid $60 million for a single season of work and $600 million over the life of a 10-year deal. That is, provided he escapes the injuries that plagued him during his first two years in the league, never a guarantee for even the world’s best athletes — as star 1980s NFL running back and MLB outfielder Bo Jackson, who loomed larger than life in the pop culture firmament before suffering a debilitating hip injury in 1991, can attest.
But hypothetical injuries are something for the future. For now, opening day offers the appealing prospect of yet another two-way baseball season unlike those that preceded it. Those of us who marveled at the mere fact that Brooks Kieschnick could do yeoman’s service as an average relief pitcher and a slightly above-average pinch hitter during his 2003 and 2004 seasons in Milwaukee grasp the magnitude of Ohtani’s accomplishment. As the great sports writer Red Smith once put it, apropos another baseball miracle — albeit a far more likely one, the 1951 New York Giants pennant victory that was secured by a single swing of Glasgow-born Bobby Thomson’s bat — after seeing such a wondrous thing, “only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.