Five years ago, the idea of an NBA full of 7-footers who protect the rim on one end and regularly take and make 3-pointers on the other would have seemed crazy.
Except here are Kristaps Porzingis and Joel Embid, DeMarcus Cousins and Karl-Antony Towns, and pretty soon even veterans such as Marc Gasol and Brook Lopez have transformed as well.
We start by calling players such as Porzingis or Embid or Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo unicorns, but “uni” suggests one, and the population is growing to the point that cannot correctly and lovingly be called freaks any longer. What was freakish has moved closer to standard, with every team now unicorn hunting.
But the real unicorn in sports is from a rural town, the son of a father who taught him baseball and worked in an automobile plant — which all sounds so middle America. Except it was Oshu, in northern Honshu, Japan’s main island.
Shohei Ohtani grew up to be good enough that in 2016 he was the No. 1 starter and cleanup hitter for the champion Nippon Ham Fighters, the best pitcher and hitter in Japan. His participation in both areas was severely curtailed in 2017 by an ankle injury that needed surgery last month.
But that has not restrained the hunger major league teams have for Ohtani. If MLB, Nippon Professional Baseball and the Players Association can finalize a new posting system, Ohtani will be joining an MLB team sometime this winter. The hope is that the sides can reach an accord this week — the union has set a Monday deadline to come to an understanding — and that Ohtani can be posted perhaps in early December.
Then the fun can begin. Ohtani has said he wants to continue to play two ways. To land a player with his skills at a fraction of his actual worth — the most any team can pay Ohtani in a bonus is $3.5 million and some can offer only as little as $10,000 — organizations would probably tell him he can manage as well.
Pitching/hitting video of Shohei Otani:
But let’s just say what clubs are stating publicly — excitement at the potential of seeing Ohtani try to pitch and hit in the majors — does not match up with many of their private sentiments. There are fears an ace-potential pitcher will be hurt if he attempts to also even just bat and run the bases regularly as a DH or that he will never fulfill his optimum value as either a pitcher or hitter if he has to do both.
A few executives mentioned the growing influence of sports science on organizations has them, more than ever, giving individualized and distinct workouts to hitters and pitchers and that there would be no way to be at peak physical abilities to do both.
I hear it all, respect the sincerity of the people saying it. But you never know if you have a unicorn unless you let someone try.
The last player to pitch in even 15 games and start 15 games at a position was — fittingly — Babe Ruth in 1919, when he set the major league record with a then audacious 29 homers as the Red Sox’s primary left fielder while going 9-5 with a 2.97 ERA in 17 games (15 starts). You might have heard he got sold to the Yankees after that season and pitched in just five more games the rest of his career.
source: https://nypost.com/2017/11/18/mlb-needs-to-embrace-its-own-potential-unicorns/
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