Eric the Blue

As a little kid, I was already a baseball fan, but my team was the Twins, and the National League was almost invisible to me. The Twins never played against Willie Mays, or Hank Aaron, or Bob Gibson, or Roberto Clemente, all of whom except Gibson, who was a rising star, were settled into the back halves of their greatest years. Sandy Koufax I unfortunately knew about, on account of his performance in the 1965 World Series against the Twins. That was when I was 7. Willie Mays hit 52 homers that season, a personal best. Hank Aaron hit 32 homers and 40 doubles. Roberto Clemente batted .329, highest in the National League. The season in which I turned 10 was the one in which Gibson pitched 305 innings with a 1.12 ERA. I can’t recall that any of this made much of an impression on me.

Now I feel I’m missing out again with Shohei Ohtani. Why isn’t every baseball fan, which would of course include me, raving about him eight days per week? He has to be the greatest player of all time, and not just by a little. Here’s his line in the box score for his team’s pennant-winning, World Series-qualifying win last night against the Brewers:

Why just 3 at bats? He walked once. But wait! Same player had another line in a different section of the box score:

I know, it’s just one game, but it was an important one, and perhaps the greatest single game performance in post-season history. (Don Larsen pitched a perfect game in the World Series but how many homers did he hit that day?) And it’s not as if Ohtani’s output last night was any kind of extreme outlier. For the season, he hit 55 homers, drove in 102 runs, and had an OPS of 1.014. He also pitched 47 innings, striking out 62 batters while compiling an ERA of 2.87 and a WHIP of 1.04. By the way, he had 20 stolen bases. It’s kind of like if Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle had been the same person.