Published by
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
By Emma Baccellieri MLB’s original Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes found itself consumed by questions of fit. In the winter of 2017, as Ohtani embarked on the process that ultimately led him to join the Angels, these questions kept popping up alongside the ordinary queries about what a player wants and where he might go. These felt more existential. How will video games handle a two-way player? Will statisticians do anything different to calculate his WAR? Is it fair to call him a “utility player”—does baseball need a new vocabulary to describe him? How will his team balance his workload? What shoul…