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OC Register: A proper appreciation of Shohei Ohtani and Pat Venditte requires more than an instant


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  • Dodgers switch-pitcher Pat Venditte throws left-handed during a recent game against the Reds at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images)

    Dodgers switch-pitcher Pat Venditte throws left-handed during a recent game against the Reds at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images)

  • Dodgers switch-pitcher Pat Venditte throws right-handed during a recent game against the Reds at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images)

    Dodgers switch-pitcher Pat Venditte throws right-handed during a recent game against the Reds at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images)

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  • Angels starting pitcher Shohei Ohtani throws to the plate against the Boston Red Sox at Angel Stadium in Anaheim on Tuesday, April 17, 2018. (Photo by Kevin Sullivan, Orange County Register/SCNG)

    Angels starting pitcher Shohei Ohtani throws to the plate against the Boston Red Sox at Angel Stadium in Anaheim on Tuesday, April 17, 2018. (Photo by Kevin Sullivan, Orange County Register/SCNG)

  • Despite the media attention the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani has received this season, what he’s doing still might be underappreciated because it’s so unique. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

    Despite the media attention the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani has received this season, what he’s doing still might be underappreciated because it’s so unique. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

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During the down time between innings at Dodger Stadium, the video boards sometimes display a segment called “A Time Before Tweets.” Imagine how the real-time reaction to Rick Monday saving the American flag from conflagration would play out on Twitter; you get the idea. The segment naively assumes that previous generations would rather use social media to celebrate humanity’s great accomplishments than bring each other down. The time before Twitter had its innocent perks, but human nature did not descend into cynicism overnight.

It so happens that two of the most amazing performances in the history of Major League Baseball are playing out in real time. Now. Right now. If the time before Twitter offers any lesson, it is that social media fails to appreciate a good thing when we have it.

There is, right now, a major league pitcher who had retired 78 batters with his right hand and 81 with his left as of Tuesday.

There is, right now, a major league pitcher who has a higher on-base plus slugging percentage than all but six other hitters. He bats in the middle of the Angels’ lineup when he does not pitch.

Pat Venditte and Shohei Ohtani were figments of our imagination until recently. They are doing the work of men that latter-day sports writers would “god up,” to borrow a phrase from the late New York Herald-Examiner sports editor Stanley Woodward. (The Negro Leagues employed their share of switch-pitchers and two-way stars who never got the chance to infiltrate Woodward’s copy.)

Even if Venditte and Ohtani existed before World War II, you could almost predict the mental gymnastics required to rationalize their existence. Babe Ruth has heard these before.

Yeah, but they played before integration.

Yeah, but they played at a time when modern nutrition and athleticism were alien to MLB.

Yeah, but no coach today would let them do it.

Yeah, but.

In a “yeah but” culture, we are all critics, skeptics or cynics. Speaking our version of truth to our impression of power is but one tweet away. This is the cultural backdrop that baseball’s first switch pitcher, and its first two-way star in a century, find themselves up against.

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In a way, that makes Ohtani and Venditte more than sensational baseball players. They are walking advertisements for the possibilities of human achievement, an antidote to the seduction of snark. Even within the small fraternity of attempted two-way players, as recently as last summer there was doubt that an Ohtani could exist.

Chris Hatcher tried: he reached the major leagues as a catcher in 2010, and as a pitcher the following year. When he still pitched for the Dodgers, I once asked Hatcher if a two-way player could ever succeed in MLB.

No, he said. As an example, he held up Christian Bethancourt, the rare player who was encouraged by a coach to try both.

“How’d that work out for him?” Hatcher asked rhetorically.

Bethancourt threw his final major league pitch in April 2017 for the San Diego Padres. He walked one batter for every out he recorded (eight). Now Bethancourt is back in Triple-A with the Milwaukee Brewers, catching full-time.

“It’s possible,” Hatcher concluded, “but to be good or excel? In the AL it might be a little different if you were a starting pitcher and a DH.”

Flash forward to Sunday. Minnesota Twins first baseman Logan Morrison batted three times against Ohtani, just a couple days after Ohtani hit his fifth home run of the season as the Angels’ designated hitter.

“I think he’s doing something that nobody has probably ever done,” Morrison said, “and it might be a long time before you see it again.”

Venditte was 22 years old and less than a month out of college when he saw a switch hitter for the first time in a professional game in 2008. The batter was Ralph Henriquez of the Brooklyn Cyclones. Venditte was the closer for the Staten Island Yankees. It took seven minutes for the home plate umpire (also a rookie) to decide which arm Venditte could use to throw the ball, and which batter’s box Henriquez would occupy.

Pat McMahon, the Yankees’ manager that night, was not pleased with the sideshow. But he recalled being delighted by Venditte’s poise. Throwing right-handed, Venditte struck out Henriquez on four pitches to end the game.

“I don’t know that the opposing coach was prepared to see an ambidextrous pitcher and a switch hitter,” McMahon said.

Ohtani and Venditte caught us all off-guard because no player in the century of baseball before them could prepare us. In the eyes of the living, each man is one of one.

Maybe that doesn’t make for good Twitter debate. For every defender of Michael Jordan’s basketball throne, another is ready to coronate LeBron James. But a switch-pitcher? The next Babe Ruth? Their place in history is harder to define against their peers because they have no peers. Real time is no place for a full appreciation of what that means.

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