The Greatest Sho On Earth (A Baseball Blog, Sort Of)

I have this weird occasional habit of tracking the relationship between certain life events against larger world events, mostly as a way to get a new perspective on how long I’ve roamed this mortal coil. Here’s how it works: You make a mental note of a specific date in your life, and then compare that date to something else that happened before and after.

For example, my birth date is closer to the dawn of modern aviation than it is to the launch of TikTok. The former happened in 1903, when the Wright Brothers made the first controlled, sustained, powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft, back in my home state of North Carolina. The latter happened in 2016, for reasons I know not and give not a shit.

This kind of thing adds a certain flavor to your life — the relationship between your own important milestones and the important milestones in the world’s evolution.

Here’s another one:

When I graduated high school, the timeline was closer to the rise of 1930s fascism than it was to the rise of 2020s fascism. This provides a perfect example of the old adage that time is a circle rather than a straight line. Time only goes round and round and round, barfing out the same old power-mad psychopaths, who keep creating the same old problems, and nobody ever seems to learn anything.

Speaking of which….

Here in Estados Unidos we just finished up the baseball World Series. It was a fabulous Fall Classic that featured mucho theatrics and momentum shifts, a pair of rosters stacked with stars and future Hall-of-Famers, some raucous crowds, a couple of extra-inning marathons – including the decisive Game 7 – and teams from a pair of places that love giving the middle finger to America’s psychopath president.

One of those places is Los Angeles, home of the Dodgers. LA is the biggest city in the biggest state in the country, with the biggest economy, and the maybe the biggest contempt for our psycho president.

The other place is Toronto, home of the Blue Jays. Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, which also has contempt for our psycho president because it won’t bow down to him and his dumbass foreign trade agenda, the big fat baby.

Here’s something else special about the World Series that just ended: It featured 13 foreign-born players from eight different countries – Canada, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea and Venezuela. That represents one-quarter of all players in the series. Three of those players also happened to be the three best players in the series.

It gives me no end of joy knowing that our racist, xenophobic presidential regime had to sit there and watch all these brown-skinned, foreign-born players lead the charge for teams representing two cities that can’t stand him, in one of the biggest North American sporting events of the year, while garnering some of the highest TV ratings of the past decade.

¡Vete a la mierda, escoria criminal!

*****

With that out of the way, let us wind back to the original theme of this blog….

When I was born, the timeline was closer to Babe Ruth’s best season as a baseball player than it was to the birth of current baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani.

The Babe’s best season was (arguably) 1927, when he hit a then-record 60 home runs, put together one of the greatest offensive displays in major league baseball history, and led the Mighty New York Yankees to another in what would become a ridiculously large number of World Series championships.

Ohtani was born in 1994, in Oshu, Japan. He is now the leader of the Dodgers and the biggest star in Major League baseball, a supernaturally gifted player who is coming off another of the greatest offensive seasons in MLB history, with 55 homers and a staggeringly awesome collection of advanced stats.

(If you don’t know anything about baseball: 30 home runs is considered a very good year, so 55 ranks among the greatest ever — even in this era of the long ball. I guess it would be the equivalent of 30-plus goals in a single Premier League season).

Oh, and Ohtani also led the Dodgers to this year’s World Series title, which ended this past Saturday night after L.A. produced a thrilling come-from-behind, 11-inning, 5-4 win in the decisive Game 7.

Ohtani was not the World Series MVP. That honor went to his Japanese homeboy Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who put together one of the great World Series pitching performances of all time. Yamamoto accounted for three of the Dodgers’ four series wins – including a gutsy relief performance in Game 7 after starting and winning Game 6 the previous night.

But really, the series belonged to Ohtani. He was the center of the baseball universe from a fan, media and performance standpoint. It was Sho Time from start to finish.

And he delivered something we’ve never seen before in more than 120 years of World Series games.

*****

There’s a reason I mentioned Shohei Ohtani and Babe Ruth in the same breath, and a reason they are both featured in the accompanying image. It’s because Ohtani and Ruth are the only two players in major league history who could theoretically be Hall of Famers as both hitters and pitchers, if their careers took a different path.

They are the only two who could have pulled off that feat, out of more than 20,000 major league players in baseball history. Pretty remarkable, yes?

Before Babe Ruth became a legendary slugger whose prowess at the plate essentially changed the game forever, he might have been the best pitcher in the majors. From 1915-1918 he averaged nearly 20 wins a year and helped pitch the Boston Red Sox to three World Series titles – including in 1918, which would be Boston’s last championship for 86 years.

Things changed in 1919, when Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees and they turned him into an outfielder/hitter. He rewrote the record books as a hitter, and became maybe the biggest American sports superstar ever, with the possible exception of Muhammad Ali, or maybe Michael Jordan.

Here’s the thing, though – Ruth was a pitcher for the Red Sox, and an outfielder/hitter for the Yankees. He was never really both at the same time.

Shohei Ohtani has been both at the same time since joining the major leagues in 2018 with the L.A. Angels. Offensively, he has been used primarily as a designated hitter, even though he could probably be an A+ outfielder if managers didn’t want to save him for his other role…..as a pitcher.

During roughly half of his career, Ohtani has been a regular starting pitcher in addition to his DH duties. He’s been a top-flight pitcher when given the chance and likely would have been even better if he focused only on pitching.

But his everyday job is as a hitter, and in that role he has probably been the best offensive force in baseball over the past several years. For proof, just check out the three MVP awards he has already won in only eight seasons — and he’ll probably win a fourth when the votes come in for the 2025 season.

This kind of thing is unprecedented. It’s unheard of. You would not have believed it possible even a decade ago.

But that’s only part of the story. It doesn’t begin to explain just how special Ohtani is compared with everyone else.

He’s a big, strong dude who also happens to be a fast runner and nimble athlete. He has a high baseball IQ and a calm demeanor. Beyond all that, he seems like a decent guy, humble and unpretentious, friendly and grounded, a good teammate and gracious opponent who seems to genuinely enjoy himself out there.

He’s a breath of fresh air in a profession that doesn’t always churn out the most sterling examples of selfless humanity. Elite athletes tend to be pampered from a young age. You can hardly blame them if they turn out to be a little self-centered and out of tune with the workaday world. It’s not so easy to put all that constant adoration and ass-kissery to the side and realize you’re no better or worse than anyone else.

Those who genuinely pull it off are worthy of our praise, because I’m not sure how many of us could do the same.

*****

Ohtani batted .333 in 36 plate appearances during the World Series, hit three homers, drove in five runs, scored six runs, had a .778 slugging percentage, and had an OPS of 1.278. If you’re not familiar with baseball stats, no worries. Just take my word that those are ALL outstanding numbers.

Ohtani also started two games as a pitcher during the series, and truth be told, he wasn’t that sharp. The Blue Jays knocked him around pretty good. But he did pitch an excellent game in the National League Championship Series that helped the Dodgers advance to the World Series.

Here’s the important thing, though – for the first time ever, a player made his mark as both a pitcher and a hitter in the postseason. That has never happened before. Never. Not ever. As a lifelong fan, I had to remind myself that this was unprecedented. Everyone who witnessed it was witnessing something that nobody had ever witnessed before.

That’s the main reason I tuned into the World Series this year – to watch Shohei Ohtani. Otherwise, I couldn’t have cared less. He and he alone was worth the price of my valuable time. The same thing happened last year, when Ohtani and the Dodgers played (and beat) the Yankees in the World Series.

*****

I used to watch the World Series religiously, every year, every game. But that was a long time ago. I used to do lots of things I no longer do now that I’m older, have seen much of the world, have become a husband and father – and have discovered streaming services that let you watch tennis 24/7 (and college football, and other stuff).

My favorite baseball team is the St. Louis Cardinals. Our father grew up in St. Louis, and raised us as Cardinals fans — and how lucky was that? The Cards are a storied franchise that ranks second only to the Yankees for most World Series titles.

But alas, the Cardinals have lately lapsed into mediocrity. Dammit.

I’m no huge Dodgers fan, even though I lived in L.A. for a few years, and came to really like the city. I care less than nothing about the Toronto Blue Jays — just as their fans probably care less than nothing about the Cardinals.

The Shohei Sho is what lured a bunch of us fans and former fans and casual fans away from our lives and into the World Series. It’s not often that you get to see a generational talent on display, doing something that’s never been done before.

Shohei Ohtani is that talent. It was a very compelling World Series, and those of us who watched it got to see the magic and beauty of something we may never see again…..

….unless Shohei and the Dodgers return next year.

Image: I created it on ChatGPT by superimposing a color image of Ohtani over a black-and-white image of Babe Ruth. I tried the same thing on Google Gemini, but for some bizarro and hilarious reason its photo of Babe Ruth kept reverting to some unknown somebody in a 1920s Yankee uniform. At one point I even told Gemini to produce a photo of the Yankees player in the 1920s who wore uniform Number 3 (Ruth’s number). It was able to do that correctly. But when I then told it to superimpose a color photo of Ohtani over that photo, it went back to the unknown somebody from before. Hilarious.