Shohei Ohtani, comma
The greatest baseball player ever became the charter member of the 50/50 club with one of the best individual games ever, because of course he did
The late sportswriter and author Dan Jenkins, who was the guy I most loved reading as a teenager, wrote a book called You Gotta Play Hurt that was about a fictional character who was very obviously based on Dan Jenkins.
The grizzled old guy, who was a columnist for a magazine much like Sports Illustrated, travelled to all the big sports events, drank and smoked a lot, fudged his expense accounts and argued with his dumb bosses. In one instance he had filed a column that began this way: Joe Montana, comma.
That was the whole of the first paragraph, what in the business is known as the lede. The idea was that there was nothing left to say about Joe Montana after yet another stirring playoff win. In the book, some editor didn’t get it, and added all sorts of obvious sports cliches to the magazine story after the comma. A big fight ensued, with much swearing.
I read You Gotta Play Hurt while in high school, and years later was at my in-laws cottage, which like a lot of cottages was kind of frozen in time. In one of the bedrooms was an old stack of Sports Illustrated magazines. The cover of one of them featured Jack Nicklaus, having just won a major championship. (I think it was the PGA in 1980.)
The story was written by Dan Jenkins. It began: Jack Nicklaus, comma.
And so yes, this was a long way of explaining the headline on this post. What more can be said about Shohei Ohtani? I will admit to being slightly grouchy about the way we sometimes venerate sporting achievements more when they pass an arbitrary round number, but I will also admit that there was something truly amazing about a player who comes into a game needing one stolen base and two home runs to be the first guy ever to go 50/50, and then steals two and hits three. Against the Marlins on Thursday night, he had six hits, five of them for extra bases, 10 RBI, three homers and two steals. According to Opta Sports, no single player had ever accomplished all of those things, separately, across an entire career. Ohtani did it all on one night.
(To be clear, I stared at that Opta stat for a while, because it sounds impossible, but what it means is while there are lots of guys to have three-homer games and two-steal games, none of them also had 10 RBI in game and six hits in a game and five for extra bases. It is nuts.)
Ohtani is doing all this while recovering from elbow surgery that has kept him from pitching this year, and during the season that began amid revelations that his interpreter had stolen $16-million from him and used it to fuel a spectacularly unsuccessful gambling addiction. (Caveat: That story will forever remain sketchy due to the fact that Ohtani, who only speaks to non-Japanese media through an interpreter, has not really been asked to explain what happened in detail. But it works out fine for everyone that it went down like it did, except for the interpreter, who took full blame for the fact that Ohtani’s money was linked to an illegal bookmaker, and now faces a lengthy prison sentence.)
The crazy thing is that Ohtani was already the most ridiculous thing to ever happen to baseball, even before he created the 50/50 club. The fact that he has been one of the game’s best pitchers and best hitters, in the same body, for a few years now has allowed everyone to get used to the idea. But it is insane! It is bonkers. It cannot be. Do not even start with the stuff about how this isn’t unusual relative to baseball history: those guys in the early 1900s were lobbing balls in the direction of home plate and swinging bats the size of saplings. Baseball has evolved over many generations to the point where to either pitch or hit at a major-league level requires a rare level of skill and determination. The sport is absolutely littered with prospects who are loaded with talent and who end up unable to cut it in the majors.
And while Ohtani was clearly an MLB hitter once he arrived in 2018 from Japan, it was fair to wonder if the hype wasn’t a bit overblown in the early years. He was hurt a lot over this first three seasons, and didn’t pitch much, even if he showed flashes of excellence when he did.
Then he went thermonuclear. The three-season run from 2021-23 with the Angels, hitting and pitching and earning him the $700-million contract with almost-the-Blue-Jays, simply could not have been imagined until he did it. If you made a movie 10 years ago about a player who became an elite hitter and pitcher in the majors, it would have been ridiculed for being too silly. As if.
But, he’s here and he’s real. Imagine what this guy might do in the playoffs.
So, yeah: Shohei Ohtani, comma.
MLSE: more thoughts!
The Rogers purchase of Bell’s share of MLSE is one of those stories that has so many angles that it’s kind of hard to wrap one’s head around it. There’s the sports stuff, but the deal is also a fairly massive bet that sports-media broadcast rights will continue to escalate in value. The best evidence that they will is that they keep doing it, but observers have long wondered if the bubble will burst. Rogers seems to be thinking it will not.
My piece in the Globe and Mail considers what this all means.