L.A. Angels' Shohei Ohtani may just be the greatest baseball player that ever lived.

[Yavin4]

These numbers are super hero like.

Link to tweet

[rsdsharp]

1. You can do a head-to-head comparison between players on Baseball_Reference.

Babe Ruth wins every comparison.

[Yavin4]

2. in a racially segregated league

Ohtani is doing this against the best players in the world. He literally won the World Baseball Classic.

[rsdsharp]

4. I'll grant the racial issue. But there was no NBA, and the NHL and NFL were in their infancy,

and there were only 16 MLB teams. Nearly half of the current MLB players, regardless of race, wouldn’t be playing if there were only 16 teams, and many who might make a roster are playing other sports. I don’t think Ruth’s competition was all that much weaker than Ohtani’s.

[Yavin4]

5. Players today are bigger, stronger, faster

Ruth never faced the kind of pitching that Ohtani sees on a nightly basis. Players today train year round. In Ruth's day, they were part time. Ruth could go out drinking and carousing all night and still be effective the next day.

[rsdsharp]

7. And yet, Ohtani isn't dominating his competition

the way Ruth dominated his. Look at the bold numbers in the stats.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. Important Point

In an era where pitchers were EXPECTED to pitch the whole game, or at least 8 innings, Ruth hit 50% of his homeruns in the last 3 innings. 50% in 33.3% of the game when some steam was off most pitchers' fastball.
Ohtani has no such advantage when a hitter usually doesn't see the pitcher 3 times, and very rarely 4.
And, Ruth in the mid & late 20s had Lazzerri hitting in front of him & Gehrig behind. Nobody pitched around Ruth to get to Gehrig!
Ruth also played for years in a park where a mishit (for a guy who could hit it 450') was a homerun. That's not the case in the vast majority of the parks where Shohei plays.
Comparing such disparate eras with statistics is a dangerous way to draw conclusions.

[Yavin4]

10. Also, Ruth never traveled to the US Western time zone to play games.

There were no night games. There are a multitude of variables that make the eras incomparable.

[ProfessorGAC]

11. Good Points

Although, traveling to Chicago by train is comparable to playing on the opposite coast & getting there by chartered jet. Maybe worse. In the 1920s, it would take nearly 18 hours to get to Chicago from New York. It only takes 13 hours to fly from Chicago to Tokyo.
But, the mix of day & night games has to be a factor.

[Old Crank]

16. Also a lot fewer in teh country to draw from

For teams. US population was about 1/3 of today in 1935.
Larger pool to draw talent from today nto to mention much better training methods.

[True Dough]

3. Hard comparing players from different eras, of course

That debate will always exist.

But Ohtani is back to making a clear-cut case for being the league's MVP. I thought he deserved it last year due to his two-way play, but Aaron Judge went and had one of the best offensive seasons EVER and eclipsed the home run record, so that was hard to overcome.

[Yavin4]

6. If Ohtani can continue playing like this for the next five years or so....

he will go down as the best player ever.

[True Dough]

8. Yeah,

it would be difficult to argue against that. He's a unicorn.

[Brother Buzz]

12. Shohei Ohtani is taking the mound on Wednesday, against the Dodgers

This SF Giants fan is hoping he has a spectacular outing.

[Yavin4]

13. My gut feeling tells me that the Giants will sign him for $600 million when he becomes a FA

I think he wants to stay on the west coast, and the Giants will be aggressive in signing him.

[Brother Buzz]

14. San Francisco would be a great fit for him, but....

The Giants are kinda into that Billy Beane thingy; they can land three, four really good utility players for the cost for him, giving Gabe Kapler a ton of options to work with.

That being said, I would be tickled to death if the Giants did land him.

[Brother Buzz]

15. Brandon "Baby Giraffe", "Sparky", and "The Captain", Belt thinks he's better

Former SF Giants first baseman Brandon Belt had some totally authentic, not sarcastic at all, smack talk for leading All-Star vote-getter Shohei Ohtani.

Former SF Giants first baseman Brandon Belt is thriving in his first season with the Toronto Blue Jays. On only his second big-league team, Belt has been one of the few offensive bright spots, slashing .263/.378/.434, better rate stats than Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Matt Chapman. He's doing so well that he's second in the fan vote for the starting designated hitter for the American League in the All-Star Game. He's behind a guy you may have heard of Shohei Ohtani.

Asked about being 2nd in AL ASG voting to Shohei, Brandon Belt said:“Yeah, that's how you know it's rigged, I should be number one. And everybody knows I'm a better hitter than he is. Better DH better leader. But here we are.”— 🪴paige🪴 (@paige_leckie) June 20, 2023

Belt does only trail the Los Angeles Angels superstar by six points of on-base percentage. And just 198 points of slugging percentage, 20 home runs, and 42 RBI. But when it comes to leadership, let's just say no one has seen Ohtani with a totally real-looking "C" on his chest.

Ohtani may be an MVP, but Belt displays the kind of leadership you can only get with true charisma, access to electrical tape, and a nautical-themed costume shop. Belt is such a leader that he even inspires athletes on other teams in completely different sports to follow his lead.

While Ohtani's pitching shouldn't affect the vote for the designated hitter spot - the whole point of the DH is that a pitcher isn't in the lineup - Captain Belt was confident he could do better than Ohtani on the mound as well.

Would he be a better pitcher? "No question. I got a high school video for days that'll prove it."— 🪴paige🪴 (@paige_leckie) June 20, 2023

Ohtani leads Belt by 1,387,257 votes, so he does have a little bit of work ahead of him, if he wants to convince voters to elect a DH with four home runs to the Midsummer Classic.

But Brandon Belt needs the boost an unlikely All-Star selection might provide. After all, the closest Olive Garden for the longtime SF Giants star in Toronto is all the way across the border in Niagara Falls.

https://www.si.com/mlb/giants/news/former-sf-giants-captain-brandon-belt-gauntlet-all-star-voting-shohei-ohtani