Shohei's Miracle

On baseball, Isaiah Berlin, and containing multitudes

Most of us are good at one thing, if we’re lucky. Maybe math clicks, but writing is always a challenge. Or we are maestros with a spreadsheet, but klutzes writing an email. Sometimes, specialization goes even farther: a friend blessed with copious empathy, but incapable of planning a pizza dinner, or someone you’d drink with in dark and strobed rooms but would never meet for a cup of coffee. Someone might be able to read the meandering moss on the side of a tree, but would be lost decoding the headlines of the newspaper. We all might contain multitudes, but oftentimes many of those hordes are silent partners.

That is why one of the best stories not only in sports but in all of America right now is what Japanese born player Shohei Ohtani is doing on the baseball diamond for the Los Angeles Angels. Major League Baseball’s annual Home Run Derby on Monday and All-Star Game on Tuesday is set to be an Ohtani-fest, celebrating a player even dire-hard fans had never heard of four years ago who competes for a mediocre team.

To understand why, the first thing to know is that the skills that are baseball’s nuts and bolts are extremely difficult to master. NBA players are extraordinary athletes, but the basic act of putting ball through net is doable even if you aren’t LeBron James. The same goes for tossing a football or whacking a tennis ball.

But striking a round ball with a round bat is hard to do when the ball is traveling nine miles an hour, let alone ninety five. Firing a strike from a raised mound over home plate that same speed-let alone making it dip and dive, cut and swerve- demands strengths and mechanics that the vastest majorities of humans on this planet can only dream of possessing. Don’t let the slow pace of the game fool you: a ninety mile an hour fastball arrives at the plate in four hundred milliseconds. That is faster than it took you to read a word of this essay. Three blinks of an eye, and you’ve already struck out and are sulking back to the bench. Better luck next time, slugger.

This insane difficulty is the demanding mother of specialization. It’s the reason that pitchers can’t really hit, and hitters can’t pitch. At a young age, a player might be a kind of stem cell, gifted at a few things, but if they ascend to the pinnacle of the sport, they do so as virtuosos of the particular. A great athlete is a little bit like a painter who works in their native medium, or a musician who has merged with their instrument: a deep cut into a specific kind of excellence.

In an essay from the 1950’s, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin identified two kinds of thinkers, which he grafted onto species from the animal kingdom. Borrowing the ancient Greek poet Archilochus’s maxim that “a fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” Berlin builds a taxonomy of hedgehogs and foxes: Dante and Proust are hedgehogs, Aristotle and Shakespeare are foxes. Berlin himself was undoubtedly a fox.

In the essay’s famous final paragraph, Berlin concludes that the great Russian writer was naturally a fox, but tried to refashion himself as a hedgehog: “Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world.” This made him a tortured hybrid, and Berlin calls him “the most tragic of the great writers.” There is no hierarchy between the hedgehog and the fox, but it is important to be comfortable in whichever skin fits more comfortably.

If Tolstoy is what happens when foxes and hedgehogs mix uncomfortably, then Ohtani is the triumph of their union. He is the best at many things. The narrative translates into numbers. The Japanese star leads the league in home runs at the seasons midway point while also competing as an upper echelon pitcher. He was selected to the All-Star team, the roster of the league’s best players, at both positions.

Ohtani is on pace to hit nearly seventy home runs over the full season, which would put him in immortal company. He leads the league in slugging percentage, triples, and is fourth (!) in stolen bases. He is second in OPS, which measures how often a player gets on base and how much power he hits for, and third in runs batted in. On the mound, he is averaging nearly twelve strikeouts per nine innings, and his average four seam fastball clocks in at 95.5 miles per hour. His splitter is one of the greatest pitches in the game.

There were hints that Ohtani might be a one man revolution. Before coming to this country he was known as the Japanese Babe Ruth, and heavily pursued by a number of teams, including the New York Yankees, before picking L.A. He plied his two way trade in the Far East, in a league widely seen as the best in the world after Major League Baseball. But some were skeptical about whether this kind of versatile dominance could scale up, and injuries and inconsistency marred his promise over the last few years.

All of that is a distant memory. Ohtani is dominating in a way not seen since Babe Ruth a century ago. Generations have been born and passed away since we have seen anything like him. For a sport stumbling through challenges on the field and off, Ohtani has been a savior to savor, one of those miracles that come along when you need them most. He is a reminder that our sense of possibility is often too meager, and that there is plenty of joy on the far side of barriers and limitations.

These lessons go far beyond the baseball diamond. Ohtani’s success and the joy that has greeted it suggests that there are dimensions to ourselves that remain undiscovered and untapped. Perhaps our fear of failure keeps us from picking up the proverbial bat, or a calcified sense of self has rendered us static when we should be fluid and bold in exploring our frontiers. A cramped circumference prevents us from seeing the widest range of what could be a wild imaginative geography. We are afraid of the hedgehog’s commitment, or else spooked by the fox’s variety. We fail to see that to choose between them is to know only a part of the self.

In a recent issue of the wonderful new journal Liberties, Celeste Marcus puts it this way: “it is the solemn duty of every citizen, particularly those of a multicultural and multiethnic society, to leave her lane, temporarily or even permanently if she wishes. Nobody can understand the world, or respect what is not familiar to her, while confined to her own lane.”

This is exactly right, and I would only add that switching lanes helps not only to understand the world, but also fulfills the old Delphic injunction -know thyself. Ohtani-ism is about switching lanes in a spirit of experiment and joy, accelerating into the wonder of undiscovered possibility.

Have a great week,

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