By Vince Rugari
Imagine, for a moment, that Pat Cummins averaged 60 with the bat. Or that Virat Kohli was also one of the world’s best bowlers.
Or that Lionel Messi was, in addition to being arguably the greatest footballer of all time, also an excellent goalkeeper who specialised in saving penalties, and wore the gloves during the shootout that won the World Cup final for Argentina - after playing as an outfielder for 120 minutes, and scoring a penalty himself.
Inconceivable. But not too far removed from what Shohei Ohtani is doing in Major League Baseball.
For the uninitiated, much like in cricket, there are two kinds of baseball players: hitters and pitchers. If you’re a hitter, your duties include hitting and fielding. That’s it. If you’re a pitcher, you focus on your pitching; you may also hit occasionally, like bowlers do in cricket, but not much is expected of you.
It is beyond the scope of normal human athletic ability to be both a hitter and a pitcher at major league level. Nobody has done it since Babe Ruth a century ago - until Ohtani landed at the Los Angeles Angels in 2018 and swiftly dismantled conventional wisdom.
The 28-year-old from Ōshū, in Japan’s Iwate prefecture, is now one of only two players in MLB history to have at least 10 home runs and 10 pitching wins in a season; Ruth is the other. Ohtani was named the American League MVP in 2021 - recognition as one of the two best players in Major League Baseball. He may only just be getting started.
“He’s an outlier,” said Australian pitcher Jon Kennedy, who has spent his whole life trying to master one-half of Ohtani’s skill set.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see someone who does it as well as what he does.
Down on one knee, Shohei Ohtani smacked a home run over centre field in a warm-up match for Japan before the World Baseball Classic.Credit: Getty
“It’s so difficult to just do one of them at a big league level - and the fact that he does both, and at the same time, it’s just incredible. I’ve never seen anyone who has that amount of hype surrounding just anything he does.”
Nor has outfielder Aaron Whitefield, the second-most recent of the 36 Australians to have featured in MLB, who has had the distinct pleasure of playing alongside Ohtani at the Angels.
The boys ask me, ‘What does he do well?’ And I’m like, ‘Everything.’
Team Australia and Los Angeles Angels outfielder Aaron Whitefield
On Sunday, they will cross paths at the Tokyo Dome when Australia faces Japan in Group B of the World Baseball Classic (WBC), the sport’s World Cup equivalent. Ohtani is playing for Japan, in Japan, for the first time since 2016 - just before he made the leap from the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters to Los Angeles, and his celebrity status went from national hero to international superstar.
Tickets sold out within minutes, with Japanese fans desperate to get a rare in-person glimpse of Ohtani, their most celebrated athlete in the country’s most popular sport. And now’s not a bad time, considering he is on the cusp of his free agency year in MLB - Ohtani’s contract with the Angels is expiring at the end of the season, and he is widely tipped to sign a contract worth more than $500 million, which would be a baseball record, and one of the biggest deals for a professional athlete in sporting history.
In a warm-up match on Monday night, Ohtani shook off his jet lag and gave them all what they wanted: he dropped to one knee and smacked a 420-feet home run over centre field as if he was shelling peas. Even players from the Hanshin Tigers, their opposition in the exhibition match, had their camera phones out, mouths agog.
“He’ll probably go down as the greatest player to play the sport,” said Whitefield, who joined the Angels’ system in 2021, played with him in MLB last year, and was at spring training with him just before flying out to Tokyo for the WBC.
Shohei Ohtani fronts a massive pack of reporters after he was unveiled by the Angels in 2017.Credit: Getty
“The boys ask me, ‘What does he do well?’ And I’m like, ‘Everything.’ It’s cool for them to see what I am lucky enough to see pretty much every day over there.
“The first thing [I noticed] when I saw him was how big he was. I’m a pretty big dude - 100 kg, 6′4” - but he’s taller than me, he’s bigger than me. The one thing I can do is run, and he can run like me. I was kind of like, ‘How are you so big, and can move so well?’
“He’s a good dude. Very professional, he goes about his business, gets his work done - I think that’s a big reason why he’s the best player in the world. It shows kids and even myself, I’m 26, that hard work does pay off. He does all those little things right, and look where he’s at.
“First day of spring training, I was joking around with him and his translator saying - or not joking, I was telling them - ‘You’d better watch out, you’d better bring your A-game, we’re coming for you.’ I told him, I hope he pitches.”
Shohei Ohtani is doing things not seen in MLB since Babe Ruth, 100 years ago.Credit: Getty
Team Australia scored a shock 8-7 victory over South Korea on Thursday - just their third triumph ever at the WBC, and the country’s biggest single result since winning silver at the 2004 Olympics. It gives them a red-hot chance of reaching the knockout stage for the first time ever: next up is China on Saturday, which they should win comfortably, and then their showdown with Japan on Sunday, which will bring together the two polar opposite ends of the sport’s food chain.
Some Aussie players are juggling full-time jobs with their careers in the ultra-niche Australian Baseball League, which is played on dusty old fields in the backblocks of suburbia; others like Anderson have slaved away in the anonymity of the American minor league system, working towards a big break that may never come.
For any of them to get the chance to pitch to Ohtani, or face one of his fastballs, is an honour, an item to cross off from the pointy end of their bucket lists - and something that sits neatly alongside their own lofty ambitions for Australia at the tournament.
“It’s something you’re going to tell your grandkids,” Anderson said.
“You’re always going to mention, ‘I pitched against him here’, or ‘I saw him play.’ Everyone’s going to be watching every single at-bat he takes, every pitch he throws - there’s not a single person in the tournament who’s not going to be watching.”
Whitefield certainly doesn’t take a moment with Ohtani for granted - or with the Angels’ other superstar, 10-time All-Star Mike Trout, who is also at the WBC with the American team. (Trout’s $426 million contract, signed in 2019, is the record Ohtani is set to beat this year.)
Playing with both Ohtani and Trout in Los Angeles, Whitefield joked, is like an Aussie soccer player who happened to find himself on the same team as not only Messi, but Cristiano Ronaldo too.
“I got back to Australia last year, and people go, ‘What do you do for a job?’ I said, ‘I play baseball,’ and they go, ‘Nah, what do you do for work, not what do you do as a hobby.’ Well, I get to run around with two of the best players in the world,” he laughed.
But when it comes to where Australia sits in baseball’s pecking order, Whitefield is deadly serious, and defers to nobody - including Ohtani.
“We’re here to show everyone that we are good a baseball nation, and we can play,” he said.
“We all went through the same kind of grind together, we all work hard. That’s the biggest thing - to show them, hey, we’ve got a really good team here. It’s just being ready to go, and kind of turning off that intimidation factor that [Ohtani], like, ‘I don’t care if you’re the number one player in the world.’
“In baseball, especially, you can have all the best players, but if one thing, one play happens and it doesn’t go your way, it can change everything. It’s a sport I feel like where you can’t rely on one player. He definitely helps, and he does it on both sides of the field, but you also have eight other guys out there and if one makes a mistake, it could cost them a game - especially in these tournaments.”
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