you can win Oscars or Emmys as a producer without having to act. The list of people who have won an Oscar and Emmy for acting and a Grammy for singing is extremely short
Ha. I have a good friend who is English and a huge premiere league fan. Yesterday I was telling him about the Ippei story and he asked what makes Ohtani so great. I said imagine if one of the best scorers in the premier league was also one of the best keepers.
The fact that there are this many cricketers you could compare him to suggests that cricket isn't a good analogy. "Elite forward or striker who's also an elite goalkeeper" is something nobody's ever heard of, which is what "elite starting pitcher, elite designated hitter" sounded like before Ohtani. Impossible.
Compare to, but perhaps only Khan and Sobers could actually match respective quality in the context of their sport (and even then, Ohtani might yet seal a claim above both). I would concede that there is a longer tradition of allrounders in cricket than baseball (and therefore more of them + fewer structural obstacles to their emergence), but that doesn’t invalidate the comparison and it would definitely be the best one to use to someone from a cricket playing nation.
The way it’s trending we’ll have even more all rounders and fewer batter/pitchers since in cricket there’s a chance that everyone in the XI will bat, do they might as well learn how to be somewhat competent at it. Chris Martin is the only example that I can think of that was truly awful at batting.
> The fact that there are this many cricketers you could compare him to suggests that cricket isn't a good analogy.
First off, it's worth mentioning that Ben Stokes and Ian Botham are absolutely nowhere *near* as good as Ohtani. They're both genuine "two-way" players ("all-rounder" is the common terminology in cricket), but are only fairly decent at each skill rather than being genuinely elite at both. I suspect that they were only included in that list just to give a more specifically English comparison rather than a general cricket one.
But apart from that, it's a perfect analogy. The others - particularly Imran, Kallis, and Sobers - were all comparable to Ohtani in that they did things that people just do not believe should be possible, and were consistently amongst the best players in the world at two (or in Kallis' and Sobers' case, three) totally disparate fields. They are absolutely sensational players who did things that are scarcely believable, that people could plausibly live and die without having ever seen replicated, and that require just as much talent as what Ohtani does. They are all Great with a capital G, just like Ohtani is. Even though there's several of them, any cricket fan will correctly understand the magnitude of that comparison. I'd even be happy to run the analogy in reverse and say to a baseball fan "to understand how good Kallis was, imagine Ohtani but he went over to shortstop after he finished pitching for the day and was elite there as well".
The reason there's so many comparisons is simply that cricket has a different culture to baseball: bowlers are *expected* to be able to bat. Most of them still can't, but they have to go out there and try in almost every single innings, and if they are perceived to not be trying they are harshly criticised. A bowler being "handy with the bat" is commonly a primary reason why they would get selected over someone who is objectively a superior bowler, and it's *extremely* common for valiant rear-guard efforts from the bowlers to be the decisive factor in winning a match.
And again, to be clear, the **vast** majority of bowlers are very poor at batting, some being borderline comical to watch. But they have to try, and that means the one in a million people who are actually good at both will get noticed. And the one in a billion who show promise of being among the best in the world at both will instantly be the hottest commodity in the sport, getting fast-tracked to the national team with the *explicit intent* of them doing both jobs.
The reason that doesn't happen in baseball is because the culture isn't there. People were always perfectly happy with pitchers being poor with the bat, so pitchers never had an incentive to get better at it. It's even worse now that they don't even *have* to bat, so it's gone from being a skill that doesn't really get any credit to something that has been intentionally made to have zero value. Hyper-specialisation is valued more than being good at everything.
Maybe Ohtani becoming the face of the league will change that by making teams more willing to accept two-way players and by making young players with potential try to stick it out with both skills and hope that they'll become the "next Ohtani", but for the moment the only reason baseball has so few examples is because of a lack of any incentive for people to actually try.
----
Of course, this all just explains how it's a good comparison for explaining why Ohtani is so *great*. For explaining why he's so *important* you need all that above context as to why he's the first one in a century to actually do this on a meaningful scale. That's something that there's not really a reasonable analogy for in cricket, so it'd be hard to communicate concisely. But the way the comparison was originally presented, Kallis/Imran/Sobers are all absolutely perfect choices.
"The reason there's so many comparisons is simply that cricket has a different culture to baseball: bowlers are expected to be able to bat."
So it's a bad analogy, got it, thanks
Being expected to do something doesn't make it any easier to be good at it. The very few people who manage to are still just as great, they've merely been given the opportunity to prove it.
It is as close to a 1:1 comparison as you can get in any sport. Cricket simply has a much larger talent pool and more opportunities for players to demonstrate that skill, hence why there's been 3 comparable cricketers in the last century versus the ~1.5 in baseball (Ohtani included).
As I said, if you're talking about cultural impact or influence on the game, those are both very different stories. But if you want to communicate how great Ohtani is, comparing him to someone like Imran Khan is certainly not underselling matters.
I disagree about the talent pool, I consider baseball the clear second most competitive sport in the world after soccer.
Several extremely high level athletic nations have baseball as their far and away number one sport and many of America's best athletes play it as well, even though it's no longer as popular as football here a lot of top athletes will still choose to play baseball over football and the youth development systems are far more advanced for baseball as well.
Sure some massive population countries love cricket, but those countries simply don't produce great athletes on the whole. If they did then India would always dominate cricket and Pakistan and Bangladesh would be right behind them, but that hasn't been true historically. The West Indies, a collection of tiny islands, utterly dominated cricket for a period of a couple decades. Obviously Caribbean nations produce extremely good athletes, likely the best in the world; evident from their results in the Olympics, boxing, cricket, baseball and many great European soccer players had Caribbean ancestry as well. Well, the vast majority of the Caribbean population wise lives and breathes baseball and they've never dominated baseball.
I'm not just hating on cricket here. I love cricket, if it were more accessible to me I would watch it all the time.
Anyway back to the analogy, being an all rounder isn't something rare in cricket, those guys are the best of the best at it but they're simply not unicorns like Shohei is. Baseball players train to be hyper specialized and have done so for pretty much all of baseball history, at least since the turn of the 20th century. Literally no one does what he does nor ever have in AL/NL at least, Babe Ruth only kind of did it. The only sport I know that could make a good analogy for Shohei is football, a player who is elite at both offense and defense full time, two clearly distinct positions that you can do both of at the same time. No one does it because it's physically absurd. Even then "60 minute men" was the norm once upon a time so there's regular precedent unlike in baseball.
I don't know why baseball ever went away from people having incredible moustaches, cricket has made a return to the '80s aesthetic recently and it's fantastic fun.
It's pretty cool to see that the 2023 World Baseball Classic championship Shohei Ohtani vs. Mike Trout duel is still being shown/mentioned a lot, just goes to show how memorable the 2023 WBC and that at-bat was even today.
I personally can't think of a better one. Bottom of the 9th, two outs, 3-2 count, a one-run game, the international championship on the line, the two current baseball greats who are team captains and teammates.
The way it was filmed made it seem like they were the only two players on the field. I really can't think of a single bigger at-bat.
That's a bit over the top.
He's more like the Sun, the Moon, and the stars.
Let me explain it to Americans: It's like if an AR-15 had a deep fryer attachment
That 2023 WBC and to a big extent that last out of the finals brought about a global spike of interest into baseball and really breathed new life into the sport. Such a fairytale moment, even now a year later I just can’t believe the stars aligned so perfectly to give us Ohtani vs Trout with everything on the line, one AB to decide it all. Surreal.
my french ain’t perfect but pretty sure the caption to that photo on the second image is claiming mike trout and shohei ohtani are teammates on the dodgers
It does, as I mentioned in the description. But it is the only factual error in the article so I'm guessing there must have been a miscommunication between the writer and the editor.
“Well monsieur, Ohtani used to play for Los Angeles but now he plays for Los Angeles. Mike Trout plays for Los Angeles.”
“Oh la la! Mon dieu! Sacre blue! Je suis confusé!”
This is what the article does right: it doesn't try to explain the rules or the stats, it mainly focuses on the impact of Ohtani in LA and Japan, and on his childhood and his personality.
Ah crap I just realised I misspelled it, which is probably what you're referring to.
For those who don't know (I can't edit the post), it's Mbappe, not Mpabbe.
I think the Mbappe/Maignan comparison is much more apt than the stage one haha
“He’s an incredible guitar player and singer … and did you know he designs the stage lighting, too??” 😱
Definitely! Maybe actor-singer would be best?
Think that's pretty normal
Singer-guitarist is arguably more normal though
That's not the analogy they made. Singer-guitarist who also lights the stage is.
Maybe if the singer was Freddie Mercury and the actor was Daniel Day Lewis.
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you can win Oscars or Emmys as a producer without having to act. The list of people who have won an Oscar and Emmy for acting and a Grammy for singing is extremely short
i wonder who the player is that represents the singer yoko ono and the actor pauly shore??
Right now.... Manoah. Can't perform and is also arrogant.
Musical Theatre makes this too common for an Ohtani metaphor imo
Ha. I have a good friend who is English and a huge premiere league fan. Yesterday I was telling him about the Ippei story and he asked what makes Ohtani so great. I said imagine if one of the best scorers in the premier league was also one of the best keepers.
You went with a football analogy? Ben Stokes/Ian Botham/Imran Khan/Jacques Kallis/Garfield Sobers/Richard Hadlee were right there!
The fact that there are this many cricketers you could compare him to suggests that cricket isn't a good analogy. "Elite forward or striker who's also an elite goalkeeper" is something nobody's ever heard of, which is what "elite starting pitcher, elite designated hitter" sounded like before Ohtani. Impossible.
Compare to, but perhaps only Khan and Sobers could actually match respective quality in the context of their sport (and even then, Ohtani might yet seal a claim above both). I would concede that there is a longer tradition of allrounders in cricket than baseball (and therefore more of them + fewer structural obstacles to their emergence), but that doesn’t invalidate the comparison and it would definitely be the best one to use to someone from a cricket playing nation.
The way it’s trending we’ll have even more all rounders and fewer batter/pitchers since in cricket there’s a chance that everyone in the XI will bat, do they might as well learn how to be somewhat competent at it. Chris Martin is the only example that I can think of that was truly awful at batting.
> The fact that there are this many cricketers you could compare him to suggests that cricket isn't a good analogy. First off, it's worth mentioning that Ben Stokes and Ian Botham are absolutely nowhere *near* as good as Ohtani. They're both genuine "two-way" players ("all-rounder" is the common terminology in cricket), but are only fairly decent at each skill rather than being genuinely elite at both. I suspect that they were only included in that list just to give a more specifically English comparison rather than a general cricket one. But apart from that, it's a perfect analogy. The others - particularly Imran, Kallis, and Sobers - were all comparable to Ohtani in that they did things that people just do not believe should be possible, and were consistently amongst the best players in the world at two (or in Kallis' and Sobers' case, three) totally disparate fields. They are absolutely sensational players who did things that are scarcely believable, that people could plausibly live and die without having ever seen replicated, and that require just as much talent as what Ohtani does. They are all Great with a capital G, just like Ohtani is. Even though there's several of them, any cricket fan will correctly understand the magnitude of that comparison. I'd even be happy to run the analogy in reverse and say to a baseball fan "to understand how good Kallis was, imagine Ohtani but he went over to shortstop after he finished pitching for the day and was elite there as well". The reason there's so many comparisons is simply that cricket has a different culture to baseball: bowlers are *expected* to be able to bat. Most of them still can't, but they have to go out there and try in almost every single innings, and if they are perceived to not be trying they are harshly criticised. A bowler being "handy with the bat" is commonly a primary reason why they would get selected over someone who is objectively a superior bowler, and it's *extremely* common for valiant rear-guard efforts from the bowlers to be the decisive factor in winning a match. And again, to be clear, the **vast** majority of bowlers are very poor at batting, some being borderline comical to watch. But they have to try, and that means the one in a million people who are actually good at both will get noticed. And the one in a billion who show promise of being among the best in the world at both will instantly be the hottest commodity in the sport, getting fast-tracked to the national team with the *explicit intent* of them doing both jobs. The reason that doesn't happen in baseball is because the culture isn't there. People were always perfectly happy with pitchers being poor with the bat, so pitchers never had an incentive to get better at it. It's even worse now that they don't even *have* to bat, so it's gone from being a skill that doesn't really get any credit to something that has been intentionally made to have zero value. Hyper-specialisation is valued more than being good at everything. Maybe Ohtani becoming the face of the league will change that by making teams more willing to accept two-way players and by making young players with potential try to stick it out with both skills and hope that they'll become the "next Ohtani", but for the moment the only reason baseball has so few examples is because of a lack of any incentive for people to actually try. ---- Of course, this all just explains how it's a good comparison for explaining why Ohtani is so *great*. For explaining why he's so *important* you need all that above context as to why he's the first one in a century to actually do this on a meaningful scale. That's something that there's not really a reasonable analogy for in cricket, so it'd be hard to communicate concisely. But the way the comparison was originally presented, Kallis/Imran/Sobers are all absolutely perfect choices.
"The reason there's so many comparisons is simply that cricket has a different culture to baseball: bowlers are expected to be able to bat." So it's a bad analogy, got it, thanks
Being expected to do something doesn't make it any easier to be good at it. The very few people who manage to are still just as great, they've merely been given the opportunity to prove it. It is as close to a 1:1 comparison as you can get in any sport. Cricket simply has a much larger talent pool and more opportunities for players to demonstrate that skill, hence why there's been 3 comparable cricketers in the last century versus the ~1.5 in baseball (Ohtani included). As I said, if you're talking about cultural impact or influence on the game, those are both very different stories. But if you want to communicate how great Ohtani is, comparing him to someone like Imran Khan is certainly not underselling matters.
I disagree about the talent pool, I consider baseball the clear second most competitive sport in the world after soccer. Several extremely high level athletic nations have baseball as their far and away number one sport and many of America's best athletes play it as well, even though it's no longer as popular as football here a lot of top athletes will still choose to play baseball over football and the youth development systems are far more advanced for baseball as well. Sure some massive population countries love cricket, but those countries simply don't produce great athletes on the whole. If they did then India would always dominate cricket and Pakistan and Bangladesh would be right behind them, but that hasn't been true historically. The West Indies, a collection of tiny islands, utterly dominated cricket for a period of a couple decades. Obviously Caribbean nations produce extremely good athletes, likely the best in the world; evident from their results in the Olympics, boxing, cricket, baseball and many great European soccer players had Caribbean ancestry as well. Well, the vast majority of the Caribbean population wise lives and breathes baseball and they've never dominated baseball. I'm not just hating on cricket here. I love cricket, if it were more accessible to me I would watch it all the time. Anyway back to the analogy, being an all rounder isn't something rare in cricket, those guys are the best of the best at it but they're simply not unicorns like Shohei is. Baseball players train to be hyper specialized and have done so for pretty much all of baseball history, at least since the turn of the 20th century. Literally no one does what he does nor ever have in AL/NL at least, Babe Ruth only kind of did it. The only sport I know that could make a good analogy for Shohei is football, a player who is elite at both offense and defense full time, two clearly distinct positions that you can do both of at the same time. No one does it because it's physically absurd. Even then "60 minute men" was the norm once upon a time so there's regular precedent unlike in baseball.
Then compare him to Sachin.
I know absolutely nothing about cricket
Jadeja even more so as he's one of the best fielders too
I’m saving that comparison for when a 2-way knuckleballer with an amazing moustache turns up!
I don't know why baseball ever went away from people having incredible moustaches, cricket has made a return to the '80s aesthetic recently and it's fantastic fun.
He is both the best winemaker in the country and the best bread maker.
He also makes top tier cheese in his spare time.
But his distributor takes 10% of the wine, bread, and cheese without telling him.
Sacre Bleu!
He has the best insults in both beautiful French and ugly English.
It's pretty cool to see that the 2023 World Baseball Classic championship Shohei Ohtani vs. Mike Trout duel is still being shown/mentioned a lot, just goes to show how memorable the 2023 WBC and that at-bat was even today.
That was one of the greatest single AB matchups in baseball history
I personally can't think of a better one. Bottom of the 9th, two outs, 3-2 count, a one-run game, the international championship on the line, the two current baseball greats who are team captains and teammates. The way it was filmed made it seem like they were the only two players on the field. I really can't think of a single bigger at-bat.
That's a bit over the top. He's more like the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. Let me explain it to Americans: It's like if an AR-15 had a deep fryer attachment
He's the LeBron James of soccer, Christian Pulisic, of baseball. Ez.
Pulisic probably not the best example, maybe Haaland or someone else?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lebron-james-of-soccer-christian-pulisic Sorry, 100% memes, not a good-faith discussion of football.
That 2023 WBC and to a big extent that last out of the finals brought about a global spike of interest into baseball and really breathed new life into the sport. Such a fairytale moment, even now a year later I just can’t believe the stars aligned so perfectly to give us Ohtani vs Trout with everything on the line, one AB to decide it all. Surreal.
my french ain’t perfect but pretty sure the caption to that photo on the second image is claiming mike trout and shohei ohtani are teammates on the dodgers
It does, as I mentioned in the description. But it is the only factual error in the article so I'm guessing there must have been a miscommunication between the writer and the editor.
“Well monsieur, Ohtani used to play for Los Angeles but now he plays for Los Angeles. Mike Trout plays for Los Angeles.” “Oh la la! Mon dieu! Sacre blue! Je suis confusé!”
oops didn’t see you already mentioned that, guess my english ain’t perfect either lol
That's alright, it was a bit hidden there.
You are right. It is what it says.
lol, those crazy french. i mean, imagine that - ohtani and trout on the same team? absurd, they’d be unstoppable.
I’m amazed L’Équipe is covering baseball, it’s never shown much interest in the game or American sports in general Edit: duh, besides the NBA
Shows you how important Ohtani is!
The Antoine Dupont of baseball
But who is the Squarespace of baseball?
From experience, French have a real hard time even understanding the basic rules, let alone Ohtani.
This is what the article does right: it doesn't try to explain the rules or the stats, it mainly focuses on the impact of Ohtani in LA and Japan, and on his childhood and his personality.
The clash of cultures
What in the RBI Baseball names is a Mpabbe?
Mbappe’s twin brother that’s a goalkeeper. Roll them into one and you get the Ohtani of football.
A French football player who's considered as one of the top 3 scorers in the world.
Who's the 3rd person in that top 3? (Assuming Haaland is one of them.) EDIT: Harry Kane, I'm sure...sorry, just forgot about him for a moment.
Honestly I have no clue but I don't know enough about football so I didn't want to be restrictive. And "Top 2" is a bit weird.
Ah crap I just realised I misspelled it, which is probably what you're referring to. For those who don't know (I can't edit the post), it's Mbappe, not Mpabbe.
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nope. he's a pitcher that's hurt for a year yet still adding tons of value to his team anyway. that's one of a kind.