What's Left for Shohei? Win.
We're not at the finish line
Enjoy this post — it’s free. Share it with anyone who likes sports and writing the way you do.
Sure, he’s a god. Shohei Ohtani is better at baseball than be these mortals wandering around him, so clearly there is something occurring at a celestial level. Perhaps he’s in the aether and not really flesh, bone and cells, although he usually appears in human form to us.
Possible.
But until Ohtani, the best player of my lifetime, is also the best player on a championship team, we’re not there. The ride — it’s unfinished. Hollywood is a place where the unlikeliest of plot-lines still somehow get made into films that people pay to see, but even by that weird standard, Ohtani hasn’t done it all.
The thing about baseball: As often as you stand alone out there, either at your position or in the batter’s box or on the mound, the stark truth is that you are ultimately dependent on at least a dozen others, perhaps 15 or 18, and maybe even the full 26-28 on a champion.
You need them to win. Even the great Ohtani.
Baseball.
That phrase, “best player of my lifetime,” doesn’t roll off easily. I saw Barry Bonds in his prime, pre-steroids and pre-Cream and Clear, and Bonds felt as close as anyone could come to being a true, complete player. He was undone by his own hubris, which is the saddest thing.
Bonds was so, so good. But he couldn’t stand being mentioned after McGwire and Sosa during those ‘roided-up home run bonanzas of the late 1990s, so he went them one further and hatched the most complex personal cheating scheme that MLB has ever uncovered. (I mean, MLB didn’t uncover it, and its overlords ran away from taking any responsibility for Bonds’ BALCO scandal at the highest rate that any of those old goats has ever run from anything, including a dinner check. But still.)
So Bonds was, pre-cheating his head off, really amazing. And Ohtani is that much better. He’s better at everything.
Ohtani didn’t just become the first player in baseball history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a season last week; he cruised past the landmark. He cemented it with a three-homer, 10 RBI night against the awful Miami Marlins, and he could well finish in the mid-50s in both categories by the time the regular season ends next weekend. (Update: Ohtani stands at 53 home runs and 55 stolen bases heading into Tuesday’s series opener against the Padres.)
And we haven’t even discussed what happens when he’s ready to pitch again. Remember Ohtani, the pitcher? The guy with the career 3.01 ERA and 608 strikeouts in 481.2 innings? Remember that player?
Before this season, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed Ohtani to a $700 million contract that is going to wind up looking like a financial steal for the franchise, considering the insane sales, marketing and merch realities that are already coming into play both here and abroad.
A financial success. It is surely a comfort.
But it’s not the same as winning at baseball itself.
Shohei Ohtani came over from Japan’s major league in 2018, and he signed with the Angels. It’s hard to hold him responsible for the Angels not winning during the six seasons that followed; even with Ohtani and Mike Trout on board, there wasn’t much of that to be had, because the Angels are fatally flawed at the ownership level.
But the Dodgers — that’s different. L.A. is a winning franchise that hasn’t won enough, which is not at all the same as a losing franchise that is trying to turn a corner. The Dodgers win and win during the regular season, but their only World Series championship since the Kirk Gibson year of 1988 came in 2020, the Covid-shortened asterisk of a campaign. (We will skip the Houston Astros cheating conversation for now.)
The Dodgers have won the N.L. West 10 times in 11 years, and they’re leading again this season, and they draft and develop talent while also signing huge free agent talent, which is certainly a success cycle. But they didn’t acquire Ohtani to keep on winning divisions. They got him to A.) make money and B.) win it all, and that part about B.) just looms larger and larger as Ohtani’s iconography grows.
The playoffs will be fascinating, because while Ohtani is incredible, the Dodgers aren’t. They are a very good team that still feels a little incomplete, and they’ve had injuries, and their pitching staff has wobbled. They had a red-hot August, but are 10-8 in September as of this writing.
It’s not that they can’t win — I mean, every team is flawed — but the stakes feel higher for them somehow. And although they’ve got years and years ahead with Ohtani, the only year they currently control is this one right here. The Dodgers need to be better than the Phillies, the Brewers, the sneaky-hot Padres, just to reach the Fall Classic, let alone win it.
And they can’t do any of that unless Shohei Ohtani, just one player among the 26 or 28 on the Dodgers’ roster, continues to excel in ways that no player ever has excelled. Did I just describe something that sounds impossible? I believe I did. But I’ll be watching, and almost expecting the baseball god to make it happen. There: We’ve set the bar exactly that high.
He can’t have it all, can he?
Who knows, those baseball Gods might just throw a wrench into that plan. :)