Show them the money, Shohei Ohtani

“Back in the ’70s and ’80s I wish I’d had an interpreter. I’d be scot-free.” – Pete Rose, banned from baseball for life for gambling, on Shohei Ohtani’s explanation for illegal bets placed using his banking account.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

MAYBE you don’t know of Shohei Ohtani. Doubtless you do know of Babe Ruth, who arrived on the big league baseball scene in 1914 as a pitcher who could bat and became the greatest home run hitter the game had seen.

Ohtani, 29, is the closest thing to Ruth in modern baseball, where allrounders are mythical creatures. He bats! He pitches! He breathes fire! Not quite. But he is almost unheard of in strictly specialised American sport. His clunky classification as a “two-way player” didn’t exist as an official designation until 2020.

Major League Baseball (MLB) has been confounded by Ohtani since 2018, when he first played for the Los Angeles Angels after establishing himself with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in his native Japan. In December he signed the biggest contract in the history of sport — a 10-year deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers worth US$700-million. Or US$26-million more than Barcelona agreed to pay Lionel Messi in 2017, albeit for only four years’ work. 

Ohtani was Rookie of the Year in 2018 but struggled with injuries in 2019 and 2020. In 2021 he became the only player to hit more than 10 home runs, steal more than 20 bases, record more than 100 strikeouts and pitch in more than 10 games in a single MLB season. He was a shoo-in as the Most Valuable Player.

In 2022 Ohtani was the first player since Ruth’s era to bat and pitch often enough to make it onto the leaderboard in both departments. “Normally I don’t worry about those types of numbers but I was getting close and wanted to see what it feels like,” Ohtani said in Japanese. His words were translated by an interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. Remember that name.

In the World Baseball Classic (WBC) final in Miami in March last year, Ohtani duelled the US’ Mike Trout, then his Angels teammate and a bona fide star, with two out in the top of the ninth, no-one on base and Japan leading 3-2. Ohtani took Trout to a full count of three balls and two strikes. Unless the next pitch was hit foul something had to give. Ohtani produced a wicked slider that veered away from the swinging Trout’s bat to reel in a strike out and clinch Japan’s first title since 2009.

More than 55-million viewers saw that. Seven months later a total of 45.51-million watched all five games as the Texas Rangers earned their first World Series trophy by beating the Arizona Diamondbacks. That’s an average of 9.08-million per game, or more than six times fewer than for the WBC climax. 

Ohtani has yet to feature in a World Series. If and when he does, expect those numbers to be hit out of the park. Merely signing him improved the Dodgers’ chances of winning this year by 3.4%, according to the bookies. And that’s despite the team knowing he can’t pitch until at least 2025 because of an elbow injury.

Undoubtedly Ohtani is good for the baseball business. But is some of the business around baseball good for him? Here’s where Mizuhara, the interpreter, comes back into the story.

The Dodgers fired him in March after Ohtani’s lawyers alleged he had hacked the player’s banking account to pay a bookmaker in California, where betting on sport is illegal. A federal investigation cleared Ohtani, and Mizuhara has been charged with bank fraud for stealing more than US$16-million from Ohtani.

Gambling has been baseball’s kryptonite since the Chicago White Sox were bribed, reportedly by mob boss Arnold Rothstein, to throw the 1919 World Series. The scandal resulted in the appointment in 1920 of the game’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a judge who became the most powerful man in baseball. Ruth himself was obliged to write to Landis in 1924: “You can rest assured that I do not intend to do any more betting on the [horse] races.”

Not everybody is willing to let Ohtani go so quietly. Pete Rose was headed for the Hall of Fame before his betting on baseball while he was a player and a manager was exposed. He was banned for life. What did Rose make of Ohtani’s explanation? In a recent TikTok video that seems to have been shot in a casino, Rose says: “Back in the ’70s and ’80s I wish I’d had an interpreter. I’d be scot-free.” Doubtless Hansie Cronjé would concur. 

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Shohei Ohtani makes baseball fear to tread where cricket has always gone

Garfield Sobers is cricket’s only genuine, unarguable, bulletproof allrounder. Wasim Akram? Bowler. Jacques Kallis? Batsman.

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Florence

A nice young man is scaring the bejaysus out of Major League Baseball (MLB). His name is Shohei Ohtani and — make sure any kids who play Little League are out of the room if you’re reading this aloud — he hits as well as he pitches.

That’s right: he hits as well as he pitches, a fact that is causing shock, horror and not a little amazement from California to Connecticut.

Thereby hangs a lesson for cricket, which is decades behind its American cousin in how to get the best out of its players.

In cricket, Ohtani would not be a phenomenon purely because he is what baseball is calling, quaintly, a “two-way” player. Closer to the truth is that cricketers who are able to bat as well as they are able to bowl have always been rare. Of all the 2 899 men who have played Test cricket, Garfield Sobers is the only genuine, unarguable, bulletproof article. Wasim Akram? Bowler. Jacques Kallis? Batsman.

Fewer allrounders are produced now than ever because T20’s reliance on players who are jacks of all disciplines and masters of none has the equal and opposite effect of making Test cricket invest more heavily in specialists, if only to set itself apart from the terrible infant. One of these decades, if that trend continues, the poles of cricket’s core skills are going to be as far apart as baseball’s.

The 2018 MLB season, in which each team plays at least 162 games, was less than 30 matches old on May 9. But in his first US campaign Ohtani, at 23 already a household name in his native Japan, where he played for the Nippon-Ham Fighters, is attracting the kind of attention reserved for World Series stars.

He has made a decent beginning as a starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, winning three of his five games and losing one, allowing 20 hits and 12 runs in 26.1 innings.

So far, so understandable — for Americans. What’s startling them is that Ohtani has also had 20 hits, four of them home runs, in his 60 plate appearances for an average of .333.

The context of all that is that pitchers don’t bat at all during the regular season in the American League (AL), where the Angels play, because they spend so much time and effort pitching and practising pitching that they invariably make awful batters.

Since 1973 in the AL, instead of the pitcher going down looking at or swinging at strikes, a “designated hitter”, or DH, has batted on their behalf in the nine-strong line-up.

In the National League (NL), where pitchers still bat, Jacob de Grom, a right-handed starter for the New York Mets, was at the plate more times than any other pitcher in 2017. But 273 of all the 509 players who took a swing in the NL batted more than De Grom. That’s more than half. Forty-six players didn’t bat at all. They were all pitchers.

Starting pitchers will often take five days’ rest after they play a game, and rarely fewer than three days.

Scandalously, on some of what should be his rest days, Ohtani serves as the Angles’ DH. 

Not since Babe Ruth strode the diamond has something similar happened with any seriousness. Ruth arrived at the Boston Red Sox in 1914 as a pitcher who could bat a bit. A bit became a lot, and by the end of the 1919 season he was no longer pitching regularly — mostly because the Sox could put more bums on seats if Ruth played every day as an outfielder rather than once or twice a week as a pitcher.

Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees before the 1920 season, and in the next 15 years as “The Sultan of Swat” built his legend as the home run king, he pitched only 31 innings. In his six years in Boston, he had hurled 1 190.1.

So Ohtani is challenging 99 years — the difference between 1919 and 2018 — of how things have been done in baseball.

It’s early days yet, but his batting average is in the ballpark with that of last season’s AL batting champion, the Houston Astros’ José Altuve, who averaged .346.

If you know anything about big league ’ball, you know what Ohtani is doing is not unlike Galileo daring to suggest the earth isn’t flat.

Such is baseball’s belief in specialists that Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher the game has seen, was paid US$169.6-million over the course of his 18-year career. That’s good money for anyone, much less a player who threw an average of only 14.8 pitches per game as a reliever between 2002 and 2013. 

American high schools aren’t short of baseball players who can bat, can pitch, can field. But that’s how the scouts figure out who has the raw talent to make it to the majors.

After that, it’s each into their own pigeonhole: as pitchers or position players, and position players are parsed further. Outfielders and first-basemen are expected to do the bulk of the hitting, and next in that order come the middle infielders — second-basemen, shortstops and third-basemen. 

Middle infielders especially but also outfielders need plenty of pace around the bases, particularly if they don’t carry big bats. 

Catchers are almost as specialised as pitchers, some of whom will only pitch to their “personal catchers”.

Imagine Kagiso Rabada bowling only when Quinton de Kock is behind the stumps, and Heinrich Klaasen strapping on the pads for everyone else.  

That’s difficult to fathom, but South Africans who remember when sport had seasons and players had real jobs know it used to be feasible to play more than one sport to a high level.

Exhibit A: Errol Stewart, the former South Africa and Dolphins wicketkeeper-batsman and Sharks centre. He is the most recent example in a club that counts Herschelle Gibbs, Peter Kirsten and Gerbrand Grobler among its many members.

But rampant professionalism and specialisation has changed all that, and made the allrounder extinct in that sense and endangered in others.

Much more of that, and one day the kids will have to be sent out of the room before we can talk about that outrageous youngster who bats No. 6 and bowls first change. 

Scary stuff, isn’t it.