The sun blinked
Last year, I wrote some text about Shohei Ohtani. I tried to make it clear why this person is important, and why sports’ general penchant for hyperbole is, in this particular case, justified. It resonated with some of you, and maybe you’re wondering what happened next.
Normally a pitcher who hits, he got injured last year and couldn’t pitch this season. He figured “hey, gap year, gonna find myself,” and tried to figure out how to be the best hitter possible. Then he tried to figure out how to be the best baserunner possible. He is 6’4” and 210lb, which is the sort of build that you would expect out of a lumberjack-grade slugger who mashes dingers to the moon and trots, very slowly, around the bases.
In short, you’re either a good baserunner or you’re a good slugger, rarely both. Shohei Ohtani became both. Of course he became both. Why not? Enjoy your gap year, find god and so forth.
Statistics are needed now. In baseball history, there had been 5 players to hit 40 home runs & steal 40 bases in a season. Ohtani became the sixth, and then he became the first to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases. He also did that during one of the most dominant single-game performances of all time. Watch the aforelinked in full. The call of the 50/50 shot is one thing, but watching the commentator’s brain snap when Ohtani hits his 51st home run is the real slug. Just pure. We can all relate, no?
We seldom witness athletes justify the hype. Injuries happen. In the vacuum, heroes come out of nowhere. Like Freddie Freeman, who soldiered through two injuries to hit the defining play of the whole 2024 season. That home run mirrors one of the most famous home runs – and announcer calls – of all time: game 1 of the World Series at home, 2 outs, walked off, etc. Pure little league stuff, the sort of thing millions of children dream about. The kind of hit that gets you on late-night talk shows, you know?
Oh, don’t worry: they didn’t just win game 1. The Dodgers, along with Shohei Ohtani, won the rest of the World Series. After all, you can’t hit a grand slam like that and not do enough psychic damage to comprehensively win the whole thing. Imagine being on the losing side of that game, knowing the history, the lore, knowing you blew the lead twice. People don’t recover from that fast enough to take 4 more, you know?
Normally, baseball concludes in messier, less interesting fashion. 7 games. Blowouts. Gosh, one season the Rangers might even win. But here, we had the lore, the sheer economic impact of the guy, a whole country watching him at 9am, and it all paid off in the end.
What a season. What a conclusion to it all. And he has 9 years left.