During the first game of a Wednesday doubleheader, Shohei Ohtani received the news that he’d torn his UCL, a devastating blow to one of the best individual baseball seasons in history and a serious twist for his impending free agency. During the second game, he served as the designated hitter, doubled to right field and had this delightful exchange at second base with Reds phenom Elly De La Cruz.
Elly De La Cruz gotta check if Shohei is real 😂🦄@Angels | #GoHalos pic.twitter.com/JLcIHEhdr3
— Bally Sports West (@BallySportWest) August 24, 2023
The rookie shortstop marveled at Ohtani, poking him to see whether he was real, as if his legend were simply too great to take on belief alone. In response, Ohtani playfully rolled his eyes, joking right back.
Now, in the shadow of his injury news, the moment looks bittersweet. But at the time, it was fun, a mischievous little reminder that even the most remarkable ballplayers in the world cannot help but stand in awe of Ohtani. De La Cruz knew that Ohtani had left his start in the first game of the doubleheader in just the second inning after showing an alarming dip in his velocity. But if that combination of events ordinarily spells disaster for pitchers, well, how was there anything ordinary here? It was almost easy to forget that Ohtani had been pulled from the first game at all. It was easy to watch him make smooth, confident contact with a first-pitch curve, stride into second for a double and need to reach out just to see: Are you real?
About two hours later, after the conclusion of that second game, Ohtani’s injury was announced by the team. The news fractured a jaw-dropping year of individual performance, the upcoming market for free agency and, perhaps, Ohtani’s future as a whole. (It would have fractured the Angels’ season, too, had there been anything left to fracture: They lost both games of the doubleheader to the Reds to stay in fourth place and fall to 61–67.) Yet the sequencing of events ended up feeling like just another display of the power of Ohtani.
Here is someone who has rewritten nearly every belief we take for granted about the possibilities of the game. And here is another example of that. What does a player do immediately after receiving brutal news in the final stretch of his contract year? He goes out to play the second game of a doubleheader, contributes, jokes around when he gets on base.
The days and weeks to come will provide answers to some of the outstanding questions here. Those include whether Ohtani will continue hitting for the next month while sidelined from pitching, whether he will undergo Tommy John surgery for the second time after first getting the procedure in 2018 and whether he will need to make serious compromises to his workload going forward. For now, there’s an opportunity simply to appreciate what he has done, even if he does not play again this year.
Orlando Ramirez/USA TODAY Sports
Many baseball conversations run on comparisons. They’re the most discussed part of a scouting report for a reason—people like to have a reference point, a preexisting example to which they can point, a benchmark. This is true even for players who are described as unprecedented. They still fit a model: Maybe they stretch the limits of the model, change the terms of its success, but they still fit. There is a common definition of an exceptional power hitter or a strikeout artist or a natural center fielder. You can recognize their general shape. A shared understanding of the game is founded on these comparisons for greatness, layered atop one another to make a massive, ever-growing tower of shared references.
And then came Ohtani.
Any discussion of breaking the model does not work: What model existed for him to break? There is simply no comparison here. At first, people tried to use Babe Ruth, and yes, at first, that was fine. Now? It’s so lacking as to seem utterly foolish. Ruth had just one season with at least 100 innings as a pitcher and 400 plate appearances as a hitter. That was 1919. It was the year he began to seem like the best the game had ever seen at the plate and came to terms with the idea that, to unlock this performance consistently, he would simply not be able to pitch anymore. Ruth was a stratospheric hitter that season. He was also a league-average pitcher on a lightened workload. Ultimately, Ruth understood that he could not find a path to greatness doing both, and so he left pitching behind.
At this point, you could pull out the statistics, break down the inadequacies, show exactly where this comparison falls apart. (For the record: This is Ohtani’s third consecutive season with at least 100 innings as a pitcher and 400 plate appearances as a hitter—in fact, actually, his third consecutive season with at least 130 innings and 550 plate appearances!—without ever looking compromised or league-average in any facet of his game.) But that cheapens the whole deal. It’s simply not a functional comparison. If you are looking for a model for this kind of greatness, well, Ohtani is the model. There is no one else.
Still, there’s comfort in a reference point, a familiar framework, so give this one a try. Think of the mythology around Ruth, so resilient for more than a century, the idea that he was larger than life in a way that would never be touched. Think of how the game has changed—a better, deeper, more diverse talent pool; more demands on players; a tougher, more specialized environment. Think about that. And then think about this: A hundred years ago Ruth tried to be Ohtani for just one season, and he realized he could not do it.
No one else has gotten close enough to make even an attempt.
And so even if this is all we see of this particular strain of greatness for now—if you were standing on the field with Ohtani, trying to process all he was capable of, you’d probably reach out to see whether he was real, too.
