@Mallory Nice! Similar to what Ohtani did on that pitch to get Trout out right?

Since no one has pointed this out yet, there's one terminology thing you should know. A "ball" means something different in baseball than it does in cricket. As you've probably seen in other comments the equivalent of a "ball" cricket is a "pitch" in baseball. As in "he threw 15 pitches". A "ball" in baseball is a pitch specifically that is thrown outside of the strikezone and also not swung at by the batter (umps dont always call it correctly though). If the batter swings at the pitch, its a strike no matter where its thrown. If the pitcher throws 4 balls, then the batter gets a free pass to 1st base, which is called a "base on balls" or more commonly a "walk". One of the biggest skills as a pitcher is to get the batter to swing at pitches outside of the strikezone. A common saying you will here an announcer say is "he swung at ball 4", meaning he swung at a pitch outside of the strikezone that would have been ball 4 if he layed off the pitch.

The cricket equivalent would be probably be having the same guy opening the batting and the bowling. Ohtani is a bit different from an all rounder as hes one of the best in both disciplines and he does this in a sport where pitchers no longer have to hit.

It'd be like Kallis if Kallis opened the bowling, sending down 150+ km/h bouncers. He's easily a top 5 pitcher right now and he's a damn good hitter too. But more crucially, it'd be Kallis doing it in a world where all rounders didn't exist. Or they did, but they died out 100 years ago.

Hitting a baseball is often said to be the hardest thing to do in sports. In fact doing it with consistency should be physically impossible because you have to have such insane hand eye coordination and be able to make decisions in fractions of a second. To be elite at that AND be an elite pitcher is just incredibly rare. He won the genetic lottery twice in one body.

Nobody has done what he's currently doing in over 100 years. Also, as good as Babe Ruth was(WAR doesn't lie), I'd argue that Shohei is far more talented than Ruth. Ruth never had elite speed like Ohtani, nor did he have the type of arm Shohei has.

This is one aspect I've never understood about baseball. I grew up playing and watching baseball obessively until I was around 15-16. What happens between that age and the pros that results in pitchers being such godawful hitters? The best baseball players I've ever played, with or against, were great hitters and great at fielding or catching or pitching. That all seems to disappear somewhere around high school or college and continues into the pros. Most go onto hit and field or hit and catch or fail to hit and pitch. Why are pitchers so fucking bad at hitting? What is it, specifically, about pitchers? It makes no sense and it never has to me. Ohtani would be a star regardless, but what is it about the baseball pipeline pitcher that produces such garbage hitters compared to other positions? Are they held out of all the normal baseball drills for fear of injury or something?

He'd lose so many of his PAs by never being able to hit as a DH. He'd have like 80-100 PAs in games he pitched plus a bunch of PH appearences rather than the 560 PAs he had as a DH in 2021 before the Ohtani rule

@Trevor I’ve thought for a while that the universal DH kind of hurt Ohtani, if only in accolades. If he’d played ten years ago in the NL how would he not be the MVP every year? Every team has a guaranteed out in the nine-spot and here’s one team who at least every several days has an amazing hitter, that’s hugely valuable.

t’s sorta been mentioned but I just want to emphasize a point others are making: For over 100 years pitchers were required to be batters in the National League. So literally thousands of pitchers were also batters for over a century. And they were almost uniformly terrible at batting. They were perceived as rally-killing automatic outs. Like, you had a few rare pitchers, like Zack Greinke, who were known to be at-most mediocre batters, and that was seen as a remarkable added value. He might get a single every now and then and that felt like a little blessing. There’s a video of pitcher Bartolo Colon hitting a home run for the Mets. It’s the only time he did it in his entire career as an MLB player and it’s treated like the discovery of a unicorn. https://youtu.be/OVFsq9FQBlc - The announcer literally points out that Colon hadn’t got a hit all year and then excitedly shouts “The impossible has happened!” So this is not a case where baseball culture just didn’t allow opportunity for a two way player to emerge until Ohtani forced the issue. An Ohtani-style player could have emerged in the National League at any time for over 100 years. The rules actively encouraged it! And it still never happened!