Shohei Ohtani and the Player Who Shouldn't Exist

For more than a century, baseball operated on a simple principle. Pitchers pitch. Hitters hit. A man could not do both at the highest level. The last player to try was Babe Ruth, who gave up pitching to become a full-time hitter after the 1919 season. Nobody attempted it again for a hundred years.

Shohei Ohtani attempted it, and he succeeded in a way that made the word "unprecedented" feel inadequate.

Ohtani was born in 1994 in Oshu, Iwate, Japan. He played for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in Nippon Professional Baseball, where he pitched and hit simultaneously. When he posted for Major League Baseball after the 2017 season, every team wanted him. He chose the Los Angeles Angels.

In his first six seasons with the Angels (2018-2023), Ohtani put together a statistical profile that had no historical comparison. As a hitter, he hit .274 with 171 home runs. As a pitcher, he posted a 3.01 ERA with 608 strikeouts in 481 innings. He won the American League MVP award unanimously in 2021 and 2023, and only Aaron Judge's record-breaking 62-homer season in 2022 prevented him from winning three in a row.

In 2023, he led the AL with 44 home runs while winning 10 games as a pitcher. He was the first player to be selected as a First Team All-Star as both a designated hitter and a starting pitcher in the same season.

After the 2023 season, Ohtani signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the largest contract in the history of professional sports. The deal included an unprecedented structure in which 97% of the money was deferred until after the contract's conclusion, an arrangement Ohtani himself proposed to give the Dodgers payroll flexibility to build a competitive roster around him.

In 2024, recovering from elbow surgery that kept him off the mound, Ohtani played only as a designated hitter. He became the first player in MLB history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season (finishing with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases), won his third unanimous MVP award, and won the World Series in his first postseason appearance.

In 2025, Ohtani returned to pitching and set a Dodgers franchise record with 55 home runs, winning his fourth MVP award, his second consecutive in the National League, all of them unanimous. He became the only player in baseball history to win multiple MVP awards in each league.

The comparison to Ruth is inevitable but imprecise. Ruth was a great pitcher who became a great hitter. He did both, but not at the same time at the highest level. Ohtani does both simultaneously, in an era when every pitch is tracked by radar guns, every swing is measured by exit velocity sensors, and every recovery session is monitored by medical staff. He is performing a feat that modern baseball had declared impossible.

The Ohtani rule, formally adopted in 2022, allows a starting pitcher to remain in the game as the designated hitter even after being relieved on the mound. The rule was created for one player. It exists because the rulebook had no framework for what Ohtani was doing, because nobody had done it before.