How good is Shohei Ohtani?
“If he were a Yankee, he’d be Taylor Swift-famous,” a friend says. That might be a rare case of overselling the Los Angeles Angels’s pitcher and designated hitter, the lone supernova in a sputtering old pastime that needs all the hype it can get.
It has been more than a century since baseball had such a double threat. Babe Ruth was once one of the game’s best pitchers, but not even Ruth, who focused on hitting after the Yankees bought him from Boston in 1919, ever dominated on the mound and at the plate like the twenty-nine-year-old Ohtani has done since he left Japan to join the Angels in 2018. This season, All-Star pitcher Ohtani has been keeping the Angels in the hunt for a playoff spot while All-Star hitter Ohtani leads the majors in home runs, walks, and even triples. For a modern comparison you might have to ask, how good would Patrick Mahomes be if he were also an All-Pro linebacker? Or: what if Meryl Streep could dunk on Brittney Griner?
On the eve of the trade deadline, as rumors swirled that the Angels might be ready to cash in, some of baseball’s best minds addressed a key question: is Ohtani already the game’s GOAT?
“Let me say this: his two-way presence flies in the face of Darwin, who reasoned that specialization was the irreversible trend in all species,” John Thorn told me. According to Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, “Ohtani may not be compared directly with any other player in history, even Ruth. He may only be compared with two-way stars when the game was new, before the Civil War.”
Tim Kurkjian isn’t convinced. “Ohtani is not the best player ever — not yet,” says ESPN’s Kurkjian, who has covered baseball for half a century. “He is the most remarkable player ever, the most talented player ever, but he hasn’t done it long enough to be the best ever. Babe Ruth was the best left-handed pitcher in the American League — he has more career shutouts than Pedro Martinez. When Ruth became an everyday outfielder, he became the greatest hitter of all time. I am in the vast minority on this, but I think that if the Yankees had a DH in 1920, Ruth would have hit fifty home runs and won twenty games.”
Jim Bowden disagrees. “Ohtani is the most talented player in Major League history, enjoying the best single-season performance the game has ever seen,” says Bowden, a former Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals GM and MLB pundit. “Babe Ruth could not have matched him if he’d pitched beyond 1919 because he never had the repertoire nor the stuff Ohtani displays. Ohtani is truly a unicorn.”
MLB historian Thorn sides with Bowden: “After 1918, Ruth’s pitching stats began to decline. He could not, in my view, have recovered the vigor of his best years as a pitcher.”
But even Kurkjian sees Ohtani as a modern miracle. “I don’t claim Ruth would have done it throwing 100 miles an hour, or running as fast as Ohtani or, despite Ruth’s prodigious power, hitting balls to where Ohtani hits them.”
Will Ohtani’s example bring a new generation of two-way players?
“Not of this magnitude,” Bowden says.
“Not with today’s emphasis on keeping players healthy,” says Kurkjian. “We take our starting pitchers out after a hundred pitches. We give position players days off when they don’t need them. I don’t see a team risking the future of a young pitcher by having him hit six days a week. I think there are young pitchers who could DH when they’re not pitching, but the key is to never stop doing both.” Major league organizations develop pitchers and hitters but not hybrids. College players who pitch and play shortstop are told to pick one or the other after a big-league club signs them. “And if you take two years away from hitting in the minor leagues, and then try to hit in the majors, it’s exceptionally difficult. Only Ohtani can do this. That’s why he is unique, the biggest star in the game, the best player in the game, a once-in-a-lifetime talent.”
Says Bowden, “It is highly unlikely we ever see another two-way player of his magnitude in any of our lifetimes.”
Ohtani is both unicorn and GOAT. Where does he go from here? That’s the most important question baseball has faced since Boston sold Ruth to the Yankees.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition.
