How Shohei Ohtani turns baseball back into child’s play
Of all the baseball players making millions of dollars “playing a kid’s game,” none are doing so in quite the child-like fashion as Shohei Ohtani, who became The Story of the 2021 season.
Trying to put Ohtani’s performance into perspective, Angels manager Joe Maddon last summer said he was the prototypical Little League star: “You hit and you pitch and you’re first in line for the ice cream cone.”
Anyone who has sat uncomfortably on the bleachers at a Little League game fully understands how that level of baseball works: Every team has one kid who is simply better than all the others. He’s the best pitcher. He’s the best hitter. The other parents feel their hearts sink just a little bit when he misses a game for that family camping trip to Big Bear, because the team’s chances of winning that day have significantly dropped. Every player in the major leagues used to be that kid.
At some point between Little League and the majors, though, the game forces the kid to specialize. He may be the best hitter and the best pitcher among a group of random 12-year-olds, and maybe even on his high school team. At some point after that, as all the best kids come together, a Darwinian evolution pushes each kid into stick with what he does best. He’s a pitcher or he’s a hitter. Not both.
Then, in 1994, a baby was born in Japan — or maybe on some other planet, as his admirers suspect — and he grew up to break that mold. Shohei Ohtani went straight from high school to the highest level of professional baseball in Japan, and he starred as both a pitcher and a hitter. Although there were high hopes that he could also do that in Major League Baseball, there also were skeptics who figured that no one could play with the world’s best baseball players and treat it like Little League.
In the first two months of the 2018 season, after Ohtani made the jump across the ocean to the Angels, he actually did it. He was a great hitter and a great pitcher. Then in June, he suffered an elbow injury. He barely stepped on a mound for the next two seasons. A congenital knee condition also affected his hitting in 2019, and he wasn’t very good at anything in 2020. He called his season “pathetic.”
As the 2021 season began, there was a “last chance” feeling surrounding Ohtani. If he couldn’t avoid injuries or poor performance, his dream of starring in the majors as a “two-way player” would likely be over.
What happened next was — unload all the superlatives — amazing, remarkable, sensational, historic, mind-blowing. The other players said so. At the All-Star Game last July in Denver, all of the sport’s best convened for one of the game’s jewel events, and they couldn’t help themselves but to gush over the player who was performing on another level.
“This guy is hitting balls farther than anyone in the league, throwing it harder than anyone in the league, running faster than anyone in the league,” said Dodgers first baseman Max Muncy. “He’s a freak of nature.”
St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado, who was at the All-Star Game for the sixth time in his career, marveled: “There’s nobody doing what he’s doing. He’s an incredible talent. He’s doing stuff that I haven’t seen in our lifetime. Not since Babe Ruth.”
Ah yes, Babe Ruth. You’ve probably heard that the last player in the majors to succeed at such a high level as a pitcher and hitter in the same season was The Bambino. He pitched and hit for the Boston Red Sox in 1918 and 1919, before they infamously sold him to the New York Yankees.
Ruth, however, had little interest in being a two-way player. He was a pitcher for the first few years of his career, until he and his team realized he was more valuable as a hitter, so they transitioned him. But in the two years when he did both, he handled about half the normal workload for a pitcher, and he did so grudgingly. At one point, as the story goes, Ruth manufactured a phony injury to protest that the Red Sox continued to ask him to take the mound. After the Yankees got him, Ruth was done as a pitcher.
Ohtani is nothing like Ruth. Ohtani wants the extra work so much that one of the reasons for his success in 2021 was that the Angels stopped placing limits on him.
In 2018, his first go-around in the big leagues as a two-way player, the Angels benched Ohtani regularly because they were afraid that if he played too often he’d get fatigued or injured. With no blueprint for how much a two-way player should play, the Angels went the cautious route. Ohtani ended up getting injured anyway, so the Angels scrapped that approach.
The rule in 2021 was there would be no rules. If Ohtani said he was OK to play, he played. By all accounts, Ohtani loved this. There was a certain joy on his face and in the way that he carried himself on the field, most often apparent when he casually flipped the ball up and down to himself as he stood on the mound.
“I don’t see the same stress on his face as I saw last year,” Maddon said at one point last summer. “I think he’s enjoying the concept of being free to be Shohei and being more in charge of what he’s doing. I think he’s really digging on it.”
Ohtani’s new freedom came with the experience of three years in the majors and the strength of a body free of the injuries that previously had dragged him down. The confluence led to what was, arguably, the best season in the history of the sport. He hit 46 home runs, third most in the majors. He also pitched 23 games, earning nine victories and losing just two. (The rest were decided after he was removed from mound, so he didn’t get a victory or loss charged to his personal record.)
He was unanimously selected as the American League’s Most Valuable Player by a group of 30 baseball writers from around the country. The Associated Press named him the Male Athlete of the Year, which is an award that in this century mostly has gone to stars in other sports. Even Time magazine took notice, putting Ohtani on their list of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2021.
“The year he had was a special year,” Angels general manager Perry Minasian said in November. “You just don’t see it. To have a front-row seat, to watch that day in, day out, I feel lucky. I feel lucky to witness that.”
You’d certainly like to believe that Ohtani’s exploits will open doors for others in baseball. Maybe some of those other kids who were pushed to pitching or hitting will now be allowed to try to do both, like Ohtani. That question was asked to a dozen of Major League Baseball’s top decision-makers during the General Managers’ meetings in November, and they largely shrugged their shoulders and used words like “outlier” and “unicorn.”
Mike Rizzo, the Washington Nationals general manager, said he’d certainly be open to a player who had the talent to do what Ohtani has done, but he’s not holding his breath.
“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and he’s the first,” Rizzo said. “They’re not falling off trees.”
Texas Rangers GM Chris Young, a former major league pitcher, was even more decisive. “I don’t think teams will put any limits on guys that have the ability to do both, but I think Ohtani is one in…” He paused. “What’s the population of the Earth?”
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Jeff Fletcher has covered the Angels for the Southern California News Group since 2013, and he’s seen more of Ohtani than any other American journalist. He is the author of “Sho-time: The Inside Story of Shohei Ohtani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played” (Diversion). It will be released in July, and is available now for pre-order wherever you buy books.