Is Ohtani Already the Greatest Ever?

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Baseball told everyone it couldn't be done.

For decades every young player heard the same sentence: eventually you have to choose.

Pitch or hit.

As the sport specialised, two-way players stopped existing above the amateur level.

The game had moved past it.

Then Shohei Ohtani arrived and simply declined to choose.

He is 32 years old, in his ninth MLB season, and the argument about where he ranks all-time has already started — which is itself remarkable, because that conversation normally waits until a career is over.

What he has actually done.

Through the 2026 season he has four Most Valuable Player awards — 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025 — two World Series championships with the Dodgers in 2024 and 2025, an All-Star selection every year since 2021, four Silver Sluggers, three Hank Aaron Awards, the 2018 AL Rookie of the Year, and the 2025 NLCS MVP.

At the plate he sits around 300 career home runs with roughly 170 stolen bases and a career OPS that has lived above .950 through his Dodgers years.

On the mound he is a 2.79 career ERA across more than 65 decisions.

One precise claim worth getting right: Frank Robinson won MVP in both the American and National Leagues.

Ohtani is the first to win multiple MVPs in each — two in the AL, two in the NL.

That distinction is the accurate version, and it is still unprecedented.

The season nobody had done before.

In 2024, playing as a designated hitter while his elbow healed from surgery, Ohtani hit 54 home runs and stole 59 bases.

Read that again.

Fifty home runs and fifty stolen bases in the same year had never happened in the history of Major League Baseball.

He cleared both by a margin, in a season he spent unable to pitch.

In 2025 he hit 55 home runs, scored a career-high 146 runs, posted an OPS above 1.000 for the third straight year, and won his third consecutive MVP.

Then October happened.

In the 2025 NLCS he had the kind of game people will describe to their grandchildren: three home runs at the plate and six scoreless innings with ten strikeouts on the mound, in the same game, to clinch the pennant.

There is a reasonable argument that it is the greatest single-game performance in baseball history.

It is difficult to construct a competing candidate.

He followed it by reaching base nine times in Game 3 of the World Series — a major league postseason record.

And 2026 might be the strangest chapter yet.

Two years removed from his second elbow surgery, Ohtani is having the best pitching season of his career.

Through midseason he was 8-2 with an ERA around 1.79 across 14 starts, 95 strikeouts against 26 walks, while leading the Dodgers in home runs as their leadoff hitter.

At one point in May he had struck out more batters as a pitcher than he had struck out as a hitter. That has never been done.

He is managing a left knee issue that has limited his time on the mound, and the Dodgers have been careful with him.

Even so, he is in the MVP conversation again — and for the first time, in the Cy Young conversation alongside it.

The honest counterargument.

Longevity is a real objection and it deserves respect.

Barry Bonds won seven MVPs.

Willie Mays was excellent across more than two decades.

Hank Aaron's consistency remains one of the great achievements in American sport.

Babe Ruth changed how baseball was played, and did so while pitching well enough to be a Hall of Famer at that alone before he stopped.

Ohtani is nine seasons in.

The all-time greats compiled twenty.

Two-way workload carries injury risk that a hitter alone does not, and he has already had two elbow surgeries.

Nobody knows what the back half of this career looks like.

Those are good arguments.

They are arguments about how the story ends, not about how good it has been.

What we can say now.

The question is no longer whether Ohtani belongs among the greatest players in the history of the sport. He does.

The question is where.

And there is a case that the ranking is the wrong frame entirely.

Comparing him to hitters undersells him.

Comparing him to pitchers undersells him.

He is doing two Hall of Fame jobs simultaneously against the hardest competition the game has ever assembled, which is not a thing the existing categories were built to measure.

What it means out here.

Every great city ends up identified with certain athletes.

Los Angeles has had Magic, Kobe, Koufax, Kershaw, Fernando.

Now it has this.

And when he pitches at Dodger Stadium, the effect reaches well past the ballpark — the restaurants near the gate, the sports bars across the county, the taquerias that stay open late because people want somewhere to go afterwards.

We have written before about what a deep Dodgers run does for small businesses out here.

Ohtani is the largest single reason those nights happen.

Most people watching history do not know it at the time.

They work it out later, and wish they had paid closer attention.

This one is not subtle.

Go to a game.

Great players win games. The rarest ones make the sport rewrite what it thought was possible.

Statistics via Baseball Reference, MLB.com and Baseball Savant, current as of August 2026. Find somewhere to watch the next one. Own a local business? Tell us about it. Or recommend a business you love.

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