Ohtani Gets Remembered, Part 4

The man who broke this question.

Continuing yesterday’s piece on what they’ll remember about the 2024 baseball season 80 years from now…

This is the question I get asked at parties now: “Is Shohei Ohtani the greatest player of all time?” My answer is that there have been other players who have done more to help their teams win, and if that’s what you mean by great—measuring the player’s ability to produce wins in a sport where success is primarily measured by wins—then others have been greater.

But, I continue, what he’s doing is its own form of greatness, and nobody has ever done it as well as he does it. He’s the most inimitable player of all time maybe? The most impressive? He can come closer to matching everybody else than anybody else can come to matching him? He’s the most complete player?

And, as well, he is an experience like I’ve never seen before. Take Stan Musial. Musial was “greater” than Ohtani by some basic standards. Musial was one of the 10 greatest players ever, by those standards, and Ohtani is not. How many seasons of Musial’s can you describe, though? How many days of his can you describe? How many individual plays? How many storylines? It’s been 80 years since Musial was at his peak, and what I could tell you about him is: Great career stats, had (but no longer has) the NL career hits record for a while, is one of a very few players with three MVP awards (which used to be a record), once hit five home runs in a doubleheader. A kid raised on baseball in the 1980s or 2020s would really only be likely to come across two of those things: “Great career stats,” which is just table stakes for these conversations; and the five-HR day, a record. In a way, that’s Musial’s one lasting contribution to our baseball.

Now Ohtani. Shohei Ohtani has basically destroyed this What Gets Remembered? feature, by being the answer every year. Most of the very best players in history manage to define only one season. Ohtani has been, arguably, the correct answer to this question in now four seasons, without ever repeating why: 2018 (first regular two-way player in 100 years); 2021 (first great two-way player in history, wins first MVP, achieves roughly 5,000 unprecedenteds); 2023 (strikes out Trout to win and basically canonize the World Baseball Classic, has first Ruthian offensive season, leaves Angels and signs $700 million deal); and, now, 2024.

He’s not just the most enduring story of 2024. He was at the center of the five most enduring events of 2024—four of which are happy, one of which is sad and not his doing, all of which are better bets than the 2024 White Sox or Freddie Freeman’s World Series grand slam to be known to the kids who’ll be raised in the 2080s. Continuing the countdown: