Has Shohei Ohtani broken baseball?

Baseball players who reach the major leagues are incredible based on the fact that they made it there in the first place. The best of the best, like those appearing in today’s All-Star Game, are typically either known as great hitters or great pitchers.

Shohei Ohtani is both of those things, at the same time.

But, he isn’t playing in today’s All-Star Game. With the type of player that he is, this would be a shocking oversight on the part of Major League Baseball and its fans, as this would’ve been Ohtani’s sixth straight appearance in the midseason classic.

Don’t worry, though, as neither are to blame. Fans very much wanted to see him, based on the league-high 3.3 million votes he received, and MLB would’ve loved for him to play, but he’s taking the game off to rest an ailing knee.

With Ohtani stepping out of the spotlight for a moment, let’s dig into how this one player may be breaking baseball as we know it. While a lot of people know he’s really good at baseball, I’m not sure how many people understand just how good - and what that abundance of skill means to the game itself.

The bar he’s setting may be insurmountable.

It’s admittedly difficult to condense his unicorn-like greatness into a few sentences, so I’ll limit myself to what’s happened so far this season.

He recently hit his 300th home run in his 1,101st career game. Only four other players in MLB history have reached 300 home runs in fewer games played. And none of them have ever pitched in the majors.

Meanwhile, from a pitching perspective, Ohtani’s having what could be considered a Cy Young season (an award given to the best pitcher in each league), with eight wins, only two losses, and a minuscule 1.79 ERA, which would put him second in the league if he had enough innings pitched to qualify.

And he’s the overwhelming favorite to win the Most Valuable Player award. Again.

Until proven otherwise, he’ll be favored to win the MVP every year.

This would be his fifth MVP in the last six years. The four he already has placed him second in the 95-year history of MLB most valuable player awards to Barry Bonds, who has seven, and Ohtani’s accumulated those four in only eight seasons.

In 2022, Ohtani finished second in the MVP race — to Aaron Judge, who had to break the 61-year-old American League single-season home run record to win the MVP.

Each league has dozens of players who would be considered “stars” because of how well they play the game, but since 2021, unless a player has a season in which he breaks a longstanding record, if he’s in the same league as Ohtani, he’s battling for second place in the MVP voting.

Ohtani has one, maybe two historical comparisons.

No one today can compare to what Shohei Ohtani is doing. Full stop.

In the history of the game, many people compare him to Babe Ruth, who was an outstanding pitcher before becoming one of the best hitters in baseball history.

The difference, though, is that while Ruth was both a pitcher and a hitter, he only focused on both for two seasons, becoming a full-time hitter after setting the MLB record for home runs in a season.

The better comparison to Ohtani is Charles Wilber Rogan, known as “Bullet Joe” because of his powerful right arm.

Due to baseball’s segregation, Rogan played in what was called the “Negro Leagues” from 1920 to 1938, and per his Baseball-Reference.com profile (which currently lacks his statistics from 1930-1936), he had a lifetime pitching record of 115 wins and 52 losses, with a 2.74 ERA (Ohtani’s is currently 2.83) and led the league in strikeouts four different times.

Playing most seasons as both a pitcher and an outfielder, Rogan was equally impressive as a batter, with a career batting average of .334 (Ohtani’s is .282) and a career slugging percentage of .518 (Ohtani’s is .580).

Rogan’s statistical record is incomplete, as baseball historians continue to update Negro Leagues records, but what is available demonstrates what an incredible baseball player he was, with 162-game averages (other than home runs) either pretty comparable to or better than Ohtani’s.

All this to say, there have been more than 20,000 people who have played professional baseball in the United States and possibly one other person is a close comparison to Ohtani.

This leads to a few questions.

Is it now simply his game and everyone else is just trying to keep up?

Has he fundamentally changed the expectations of what a superstar is?

Will his two-way dominance change how the next generation of baseball players choose to develop their skill sets?

Each of us likely has our own answers to those questions (mine being “not exactly,” “possibly,” and “I’d be surprised”). What’s important to consider is that, while baseball may lag behind football, basketball, and maybe even soccer in the United States from a popularity perspective, what Ohtani is doing has reinvigorated interest in the game unlike anything since the home run record chases of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. He’s become must-see TV.

More importantly, Ohtani has fundamentally changed what people believe is possible. He makes two incredibly difficult things (hitting a baseball and throwing a baseball past others within the small window of the strike zone) look borderline simple, and even though people who play baseball at that level understand how difficult each of them are, doing both in combination may not seem impossible anymore.

Instead of breaking baseball, Shohei Ohtani is changing how it’s being perceived, and that can only be good for the game going forward.