Shohei Ohtani having an all time great game
- Thread starter Dawgg
- Start date
Pissed I decided to watch football instead. I hate I missed that.
Greatest baseball performance ever. I mean, what else can a player do?
Maybe if they’d had the DH when Babe Ruth played. But when you’re talking about the greatest player of all time, that’s the list.
The game is appreciably harder now. He’s a few years away from being on his own level above everyone else.
It’s different for sure. But players also have access to much better training & nutrition programs now. Not sure how agreeable babe would have been to those. But very hard to compare players across generations. That said, I’m not arguing against Ohtani being the GOAT. I kind of think he is.
Hopefully you mean the list is Ohtani and no one else. Compared to Ruth, the DH thing doesn’t really matter. In Ruth’s time as pitcher, relief pitching wasn’t really much of a thing. He averaged over 8 innings per start and 7.5 innings per appearance overall while being decent but not elite as a pitcher. In those days, if you started the game, you were likely finishing it no matter what. So in general he was hitting the whole game in his pitching starts just like Ohtani is. He also didn’t pitch at all for the majority of his career.
Furthermore, Ruth’s pitching skills couldn’t touch what Ohtani can do. 4.5 career 162 game average pitching WAR for Ruth. 5.5 for Ohtani. And again, ALL of Ruth’s pitching stats were prime years….as he stopped pitching after 1921. It’s not outside the realm of possibility for Ohtani to win the Cy Young and hit 50+ HR’s in the same season at some point in the next 3-4 years.
But if they’d had the DH, Ruth probably would have pitched most if not all of his career. Had a 2.48 career ERA. And he could have hit every day during a lot of his prime years in Boston. We have no idea his dominant he was at the time. Nobody has ever done what he did. Until now. Again, I do think Ohtani is the goat.
There was nothing stopping him from hitting every day in Boston. That’s the point.
I would argue that Ruth’s lifestyle choices had a lot more to do with him not pitching further into his career than anything else. And the crazy thing is that those choices are really the only thing that left the door open for others to catch him. As good as Ruth was, we probably only saw 75-80% of what he was truly capable of….at most. But that’s all subjective, and what he did was what he did and that’s what his record has to stand on.
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I was privileged to be in my teens during Jordan and get to see him in person. I feel like Ohtani is the closest thing to that in my lifetime.
Just the playing in the field every day. Something even Ohtani doesn’t do. Hard to rest your pitching arm on off days when you’re making throws from the outfield or shortstop.
Pretty sure Greg Maddox had a few seasons where he hit for a higher average than he gave up on the mound.
Just a matter of specialization. Same reason why Lebron James can’t be both a Hall of Fame NBA player and a Hall of Fame NFL Tight End, when in reality he could have been either one.
That’s what makes Ohtani so special. He’s doing what he’s doing both on the mound and in the field without nearly the same amount of practice time at either of them as other pitchers and position players.