The players could be locked out after next season. Once-reliable broadcast revenue is being threatened by a shifting media landscape. The proliferation of sports gambling has already ensnared multiple players.
Baseball could have a reckoning in the relatively near future, but it certainly doesn’t feel as if that’s the case, does it?
Why would it?
Baseball has Shohei Ohtani.
Ohtani was awarded his fourth most valuable player award on Thursday, but the designation fails to encapsulate his influence on the team that employs him and the league in which he plays.
He’s elevated the Dodgers.
He’s elevated Major League Baseball.
He’s elevated the entire sport.
Ohtani is more than the most valuable player of the National League. He’s the most valuable athlete in North America, if not the entire world.
Part of this is personality, part of this is where he’s from, but the foundation of his celebrity is his unprecedented on-field performance.
Ohtani delivers.
He was the NL’s MVP for the second time in as many seasons, this time as a two-way player.
A year after becoming the first player to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season, the 31-year-old Ohtani homered a career-high 55 times as a hitter and registered a 2.87 earned-run average in 47 innings as a pitcher.
Ohtani had comparable seasons with the Angels, with whom he won his first two MVP awards. In retrospect, however, the six years he played in Anaheim almost feel as if they were an apprenticeship to prepare him for what he’s doing now. The Dodgers have provided him with a stage worthy of his singular act.
This is what’s best for any league in any sport, for its signature athlete to be playing games that matter for one of its signature franchises. Baseball is now a regional sport, meaning teams and players are well known in the markets in which they play but not outside of them. Ohtani provides baseball with a national presence, especially now that he’s playing in October.
The numbers reflect that, with the Dodgers’ victory over the Toronto Blue Jays this month attracting a level of viewership from the days when baseball was still king. The World Series was the most watched since 1992, and Game 7 was the most-watched MLB game since 1991.
In a time when the NFL and NBA are desperate to expand their overseas audiences, the World Series averaged nearly 10 million viewers a game in Japan, where games started at 9 a.m.
None of this should be taken for granted.
Ohtani’s five most recent seasons mark one of the most extraordinary periods by any player in any era.
Ohtani has created enough distance between him and his contemporaries to where it’s hard to imagine any other player beating him out for a MVP award, but nothing about this is routine. Only one player has won the prize more times, and who knows how many of his record seven Barry Bonds would have won if he hadn’t turned to performance-enhancing drugs.
Ohtani should enter next season as the overwhelming favorite to win another MVP award, especially now that he will be expected to be pitching without any restrictions for the entire season. Remember, he spent the majority of this season preparing to resume pitching after a second Tommy John procedure.
The Dodgers will attempt to win their third consecutive World Series.
Appreciate the moment. This won’t last forever.
A reminder of this reality was offered in recent weeks by an unlikely source: Ohtani’s father.
In an open letter to his son that was published by Sports Nippon, Toru Ohtani raised the possibility of him becoming an outfielder when he can’t pitch anymore.
Ohtani will be 32 next summer.
When it’s over, when his days of dominance are behind him, baseball will return to its previous norms, with concerns about work stoppages and declining cultural relevance, and whether certain star players have the necessary qualities to be the faces of the sport.
The post Why Shohei Ohtani is much more than the MVP of the National League appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
