After approaching the Japanese rookie’s start to the season with cautious optimism, baseball fans are now losing their collective minds and all in on a player the likes of which the sport hasn’t seen in a century.
There are no ‘let’s wait and see’ or ‘small sample size’ qualifiers anymore. Not after Ohtani lit the mound on fire with a dominant pitching performance on Sunday to cap off a week that would have made Babe Ruth pick his jaw up off the floor.
In his second start, Ohtani rocketed fireballs past the Oakland Athletics in seven shutout innings, which saw him mow down the first 19 batters and finish with 12 strikeouts.
As well as painting the corners with 100mph fastballs, he unleashed devastating splitters that made hitters look foolish on swings-and-misses.
That outing alone was enough to justify Ohtani’s arrival as baseball’s newest superstar and candidacy as a Cy Young contender. If you live under a rock and picked Sunday’s contest between Oakland and the Los Angeles Angels as your first exposure to baseball this season, you would have come away impressed, thinking you watched one of the best pitchers in baseball.
But wait, there’s more! Act now and Ohtani will throw in his talents as a hitter.
It doesn’t take an infomercial style sales pitch to sell the 23-year-old though. And that’s been proven by it taking this long to mention that Ohtani cracked home runs in three straight games and is hitting .389 over 19 plate appearances.
As at home as he looks on the mound, that’s how natural he looks at the plate.
“He never looks like he’s out of place,” Angels catcher Martin Maldonado said. “He looks like a hitter when he’s batting and looks like a pitcher when he’s pitching. It’s impressive. We haven’t seen that before.’’
Maldonado isn’t kidding. We really haven’t seen someone like Ohtani before, unless you were around in the early 1900s to watch Ruth.
That’s because the same abilities that make Ohtani great are also the reason why two-way players are nonexistent now.
If Ohtani really is one of the best pitchers in the league – and pitching was considered his greatest strength coming from Japan – it feels sadly inevitable that the Angels will restrict his appearances in the lineup as a way to preserve him.
It may sound like an overly cautious approach, but franchises have a lot invested in these players – even if Ohtani is on a bargain contract having signed for six years at the league minimum due to the league’s collective-bargaining rules on incoming international players under the age of 25. So limiting players’ exposure to situations in which they could get injured is something every team will explore.
Of course, if Ohtani keeps raking like this in the batter’s box, Los Angeles will have no choice but to insert him into the lineup as a designated hitter a few times per week, with rest given on days before and after his starts.
By Game Score, Shohei Ohtani just pitched the best game of the season (90). By wRC+, Shohei Ohtani has been the second-best offensive player in baseball (278), minimum 10 plate appearances
— Max Carlin (@mcarlinwustl) April 8, 2018
It will all depend on if Ohtani can keep this up. Obviously it would be unfair to expect him to be both a Cy Young-level hurler and a Silver Slugger type of hitter, but what if he can be? That would break baseball and potentially get us to rethink the merits of two-way players and how they’re developed at the youth levels.
It’s hard not to totally give in to the excitement, but it’s still early, as Ohtani himself recognises.
“It’s just the first week. Everything went well,” he said. “There’s going to be a wall somewhere. Once I hit that wall, that’s when I need to start working harder and figure out what I need to do to get past it.’’
Ohtani has made a believer out of everyone, so at this point it’s hard to imagine anything slowing down baseball’s new folk hero.
