The baseball regular season is basically divided into a first half in April, May, and June, and a second half in July, August, and September. Two-way pitcher-slugger Shohei Ohtani finished off the first half with his 15th homer of the month and 30th homer of the season, a 493-foot brute, the longest home run in all of big league baseball this year.
As a humble Japanese man, Shohei used to race for first whenever he made contact, but lately when he crushes another homer he just stands there along with everybody else in awe of how far he is hitting the ball.
That puts the Asian sensation on the same pace as Aaron Judge last season when Judge hit 62 homers to break Roger Maris’s famous American League record of 62 years ago, when Maris’s 61 broke Babe Ruth’s 1927 record of 60, which had long been the most famous record in American sports, rather like Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point basketball game is probably the best known record today, that or Tom Brady’s 7 Super Bowl wins—a classic number like 60, 100, or 7 is helpful in being remembered. As Babe Ruth said in the locker room in 1927, “Sixty, count ’em, sixty! Let’s see some other son of a bitch match that.”
As a hitter, Ohtani currently leads the majors in home runs, slugging average, on-base plus slugging, Wins Above Replacement and is tied for the lead in runs batted in and triples. He’s seventh in batting average and 36th in stolen bases. (If he has a weakness, Ohtani is, like Ruth, an overly daring baserunner and gets thrown out more than is considered optimal by MIT baseball stats geeks.)
As a pitcher, he’s third in the majors in strikeouts. He’s not quite as effective on the mound as he was last year due to a recent lack of control (he’s 10th in walks issued because hitters have laid off trying to hit his breaking stuff, which has so much movement that it often ends up out of the strike zone), but he’s still 9th in the majors overall as a pitcher in Wins Above Replacement, the most popular synthetic measure.
In his last start as a pitcher, he struck out ten and hit two homers.
This is Ohtani’s free agency year and the Angel of Orange County is expected to sign a contract of about a half billion dollars, which would be the third biggest in the history of sports behind soccer’s Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The up-the-road Los Angeles Dodgers are the frontrunners to pony up that huge amount.
As I may have mentioned once or twice, nobody since Ruth in 1918-1919 has both regularly pitched and hit home runs. Why? One reason is the Designated Hitter in baseball, which allows Ohtani to skip playing the field. He’s extremely fast and no doubt would be a fine right fielder if he had to play the field, but he doesn’t, so he doesn’t.
Baseball stats pioneer Bill James argued on Twitter on Friday:
The reason we haven’t had a 2-way player like Shohei in 100 years is that b ball professionals were 100% convinced that it couldn’t be done, and wouldn’t allow anybody to try it. The question is, has Shohei forced a crack in the armor big enough to allow other players to try it?
This is an extension of his argument in his 1985 The Bill James Historical Abstract that Babe Ruth’s huge breakthrough in hitting home runs in 1919-20 wasn’t due to superhuman skills on the part of Ruth. Instead,
Ruth was the first person to reach these levels and the most consistent at maintaining them, but the fact that other people were able to do basically the same things he had done shows that he achieved these levels not because he was some kind of superhuman athletic freak, but because he was a trail blazer, a man who had the courage to escape the fictions and falsehoods that constrained other men’s talents, and show them what could be done.
In other words, Babe Ruth and Shohei Ohtani are the Bill James of baseball.
I’m not unsympathetic to this argument. But, then again, what do I know about pitching and slugging at a major league level?
