For a century, baseball treated the two-way player as a charming relic — something from the game's infancy, before specialization made it unthinkable that one man could both hit in the middle of the order and start on the mound. Then Shohei Ohtani arrived from Japan and simply did both, at the highest level either has ever been played, and the sport had to reckon with a category it had assumed was closed. The comparisons run to Babe Ruth because there is no one else to compare him to.
The accolades have piled up at a pace that strains belief. He is a four-time Most Valuable Player — the first player in history to win the award unanimously more than once, and the only player ever to win multiple MVPs in each league. He was the American League Rookie of the Year, the 2023 World Baseball Classic MVP who struck out his Angels teammate Mike Trout to win it for Japan, and the owner, after the 2023 season, of a ten-year contract with the Dodgers that was the richest in the history of professional sports.
An elite hitter and an elite pitcher at once — the thing baseball had called impossible since Ruth.
Then 2024 turned the remarkable into the historic. Unable to pitch while recovering from a second elbow surgery, Ohtani spent the year as a hitter alone and became the first player ever to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season — finishing at 54 and 59 — before winning his first World Series in his first trip to the postseason. In 2025 he returned to the mound, set a Dodgers franchise record with 55 home runs, won a second straight unanimous MVP, and authored one of the great single games in October history: three home runs and six shutout innings to win the pennant, on his way to back-to-back championships.
He carries it all with an unguarded joy — sprinting the bases, beaming in the dugout, a global icon who still seems faintly delighted by his own existence. He is the most-watched player in the world and, somehow, among the most humble.
An Ohtani card holds the rarest thing the sport can produce: a genuine exception to its own rules. There is no one else to set him beside. Quite literally, the only one of his kind in a hundred years.