I’ve only seen Shohei Ohtani in person once. It was May 3, 2022, during a night game at Fenway Park between the Los Angeles Angels and the Boston Red Sox. Nothing interesting happened. Ohtani didn’t pitch (he would strike out 11 the following night), the Angels only scored three hits (one from Ohtani), and the Red Sox won 4-0 with two home runs from Rafael Devers and J.D. Martinez. Both teams would miss the playoffs, and nobody would ever think of that game ever again.
Except for me, and probably the several hundred Red Sox fans who secured nine-dollar student tickets and saw the Greatest Shohman for less than an Alexander Hamilton. And for that price, I can tell everyone I ever meet that I saw Shohei Ohtani, live and in person, even though nothing interesting happened.
Now we’ve got some interest. After locking down the “Most Impressive Athlete” belt for at least the next decade by striking out 10 batters, throwing six scoreless innings and belting three mammoth home runs to send his team to the World Series, we need to have a conversation. Not the obvious ones; was that the greatest individual performance in baseball history? (of course) Is Shohei Ohtani the best player of the game of baseball ever? (absolutely).
What I want to talk about is what a player like this is going to do — and has already done — to the sports ecosystem, and what he does to our brains while watching him play. And really, I’m wondering if Ohtani might just be both the best and worst thing to happen to baseball this century. The baseball messiah is also the bringer of the apocalypse.
First, we need to establish what we’re working with. There’s a special category for this guy, and I won’t use the word “greatness” at all in this article. We need to be more descriptive, so here’s a list of adjectives other than “great” we should all use specifically for Shohei Ohtani: transformative, intimidating, television-dominating, confusing, unique, mythical, frustrating, generation-ruining, baseball-destroying (more on those last three later).
“Confusing” is my favorite of the bunch, because it sounds so negative but really is the biggest compliment out there. I am confused as to how a player like Ohtani can exist. I am confused as to how this is possible, when I was told my whole life that pitchers couldn’t hit and hitters couldn’t pitch. I was confused when Ohtani decided to steal 50 bases and hit 50 home runs because he was bored that he couldn’t pitch. I am still confused, no matter how many times we’ve seen him prove that he is real.
That’s where “mythical” really works. Ohtani’s reputation has made its way out of the sports section and into global culture; everyone knows he’s the best player alive, and most of us think he’s the best player ever. Since arriving on a team actually capable of making it to the postseason, Ohtani has provided more than enough fuel to sustain and grow that reputation, but the MLB’s content structure allows it to grow into something even bigger than it is.
Baseball is a local product, and so I and millions of other fans usually cannot watch Ohtani unless he is playing our local team on our local network. So we hear about him far more than we watch him play baseball; that is what made his Game 4 performance so seismic: we all heard that this was the best player since the dawn of time, and he proved it when everyone was watching.
And there’s a real argument that this guy, this Ohtani described above, is the savior of baseball. His absurdity has stimulated casual interest in the MLB. It has brought in a younger audience, one that is more open to the facelifts that the league was desperate to implement — the pitch clock, automatic balls and strikes, ghost runners in extra innings — and has made today’s MLB something worth investing in. In a sport riddled with anachronisms, a Japanese-born gigastar turned out to be the ultimate Americana.
But I would argue he’s also the bringer of doom, or at least the drum major of it. Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that has taken the mantle of “that annoying franchise that signs every player you want on your team” from the Yankees and has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on that identity. Ohtani signed for $700 million, and the Dodgers were allowed to defer pretty much all of that money until the end of time in order to have more cash for the present to sign more of your favorite players. They took my favorite player ever, Mookie Betts, and are going to keep doing this until… something happens.
That something is the apocalypse Ohtani will be the poster boy of. ESPN’s Jeff Passan has been banging the drum recently about the real potential for the cancellation of the 2027 season if the owners and players cannot agree on a salary cap. Spoiler alert: they will not be able to agree, as the words “salary cap” have been the non-starter of all non-starters in MLB labor negotiations. And the Dodgers going back-to-back, with Ohtani at the center, is going to break the camels back.
It’s not that Los Angeles signed Ohtani for the better part of a billion dollars. It’s that they did that… and signed Tyler Glasnow… and Blake Snell… and Yoshinobu Yamamoto… and Teoscar Hernandez… and Freddie Freeman… and Mookie Betts. After a while, it all has started to feel like a conspiracy, and has fans like me thinking a salary cap — the final levee yet to break in baseball’s modernization — might not be the worst idea.
Beyond even his contract, Ohtani has laid the deficiencies of the MLB so horribly bare that it will be unable to ignore them anymore. There won’t be another Shohei anytime soon, but there’s a Paul Skenes. There’s a Tarik Skubal. There will be bigger numbers and more big names traded because the team that drafted them could not or would not pay them what they were worth. His dominance and cultural supernova has the unfortunate byproduct of proving that fewer and fewer teams will ever be able to hold onto a player like that. It used to be that a group of eight-to-ten teams could compete for the biggest names. Now we’re down to essentially two, and it feels like it’s just one.
None of this is Ohtani’s fault. Rather, the structure that he has blossomed in can no longer support the financial reality of its own popularity. He will almost certainly dazzle the World Series, and we will all feel lucky we got to watch. But behind the scenes, his very success may push the MLB into the great labor dispute that has been brewing for decades. And it may cost Ohtani and his contemporaries one of the seasons of his physical prime.
I don’t care who wins this World Series. Ohtani and his team of super-soldiers have already won it all, and baseball players’ legacies aren’t even measured by postseason success so much as their statistical performance over time; lots of the “greatest players of all time” never won a World Series. But while Ohtani is the bringer of his own legacy, he may also be the symbol of baseball’s greatest impending conflict. Only time will tell how big this will all get.
