July 29, 2023

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

Anybody who compares Shohei Ohtani with another baseball player is barking up the wrong sport.

That’s clear by now. The phrase “on pace” is overused and meaningless, but at this writing, the Greatest Sho-man is on pace to win 18 games and hit 60 home runs in 2023.

Wonder of wonders, he might get a chance to chase that pace at a meaningful time, since the Los Angeles Angels have hoisted themselves into the periphery of the wild-card race.

Since commissioner Rob Manfred talked himself into thinking the ghost runner is a great idea, he’s probably entertained thoughts of passing an executive order that expands the American League playoffs to nine teams, guaranteeing Ohtani some October time. That probably won’t happen, but if Ohtani does actually pursue 60 homers with any degree of seriousness, that might overshadow the compelling battle for Wild Card Spot No. 3.

Don’t use Bo Jackson in the same sentence with Ohtani. Jackson didn’t have to do two radically conflicting things in the same day. He either carried a football, or he hit and fielded and threw a baseball. Not to denigrate what he did, or what he could have done with two good hips, but Ohtani pitches the first half of doubleheaders and hits two home runs in the bottom half.

Anybody who has tried to pitch even three innings of a major league game knows how ridiculous this is, and the fact that Ohtani has recently taken himself out of games with cramping problems is reassuring in a way. He isn’t a bot or an A.I. creation.

But, long before ESPN created worldwide sports, there was one guy who could have related to Ohtani.

Washington Redskins Sammy Baugh, the NFL’s best quarterback, best defensive back and best punter.

Sammy Baugh was the first quarterback in the NFL to use the pass as a creative, intentional weapon. When his Washington Redskins gave up the ball, Baugh was able to figure out the other team’s level of passing sophistication and disrupt it. And during that change of possession, Baugh most likely had put the opponent in a claustrophobic position, thanks to his drone-like punts. He actually did three football things at an elite level, and the imagination balks at what Baugh’s statistics would have been, this day and time.

He was the first quarterback to complete 60% and then 70% of his passes. He led the NFL twice in touchdown passes, four times in passing yards. His 70.33% in 1945 was a league record that stood until 1982. He quarterbacked Washington to a championship in his rookie season of 1937. When Russell Wilson broke the rookie record for passing yardage in a championship game of a Super Bowl in 2012, that was Baugh’s 335-yard record that fell.

Two of Baugh’s records remain: Six seasons leading the NFL in completion percentage, and five seasons leading in lowest interception percentage.

Punting might have been the best thing he did. Baugh averaged 51.4 yards per punt in 1943.

That record wasn’t broken until Tennessee’s Ryan Stonehouse averaged 53.7 in 2022.

“There was no spot on the field where he couldn’t drop a punt if he wanted to,” said Dutch Meyer, his TCU coach and the man who designed all those weird and exotic passing plays.

On defense Baugh had 31 interceptions, including 11 in 1943, which also ranked first in the league. That was the year in which Baugh threw four touchdown passes and intercepted four passes in the same game, a day that might even have impressed Ohtani.

Only five active NFL players have more than 31 picks.

But if everything had worked out equally, Baugh would have gladly played baseball. He signed with the Cardinals as a shortstop and found his path blocked by Marty Marion. He was known as ‘Slingin’ Sammy,” a nickname he disdained, because of the way he threw from third base to first as a high school player in west Texas.

The game was far rougher in Baugh’s time, the football was fatter, and the rules were downright inhuman. If a player left the game, he couldn’t return until the next quarter. Therefore, players tended to play through the fractures and the pulls and the hypertensions. There was no makeshift injury tent, and certainly no concussion protocol.

Later in life, Baugh said he enjoyed running his ranch far more than any football game, and his son David still runs that ranch, the 7,600 acres of it. Originally the ranch had no running water, and Baugh and his wife took baths in the horse trough. This is while he was All-Pro and the most celebrated athlete in the nation’s capital.

But, yeah, things were different. Baugh learned how to throw unorthodox, pinpoint passes through a swinging tire that he had hung on a tree. He didn’t think that was special. “Hell, there were a whole lot of old, flat tires in the Depression,” Baugh said. “Every kid did that.”

Lonesome Dove character Gus McRae, played by Robert Duvall was based on Sammy Baugh

He played baseball against Josh Gibson, and the character of Gus McRae that Robert Duvall played on “Lonesome Dove” was modeled after Baugh. His favourite trophy was a little trinket that commemorated his first hole-in-one.

He was 94 when he died in 2018.

So when you say Ohtani is out of this world, you’re saying he would have belonged more comfortably in Baugh’s world, which bears little resemblance to our world at all, particularly the football part. And Baugh certainly wasn’t the only two-way player. The Philadelphia Eagles’ Chuck Bednarik played centre and linebacker with the same evil intent, and Les Richter was an eight-time Pro Bowler for the Los Angeles Rams, who played linebacker, center and kicker.

So Baugh was merely following a custom, while Ohtani is blazing a trail.

It appears Ohtani will be blazing it for the Angels the rest of the year. Owner Arte Moreno and general manager Perry Minasian will not be trading him, even though there’s a considerable risk that he’ll flee as a free agent after the season.

Ohtani has said nothing about his intentions except to emphasize that he’s here to win. The Angels are closer to doing that. It’s often mentioned that they haven’t been to the playoffs since a three-game sweep at the hands of Kansas City Royals in 2014, but the last time they actually won a playoff game was 2009, in a six-game American League Championship Series loss to the Yankees.

That’s nearly a generation of Angel fans, marooned in October. To trade Ohtani at this point would have been a contemptible slap in their faces. And if the Angels lose and he leaves, with nothing in return, so what? It will free up $30 million for the Angels to chase a couple of significant players. If they give him a qualifying offer, they’ll get a compensatory draft choice.

This happened after the 2008 season, when Mark Teixeira came from Atlanta, put in a couple of good months and signed with the Yankees. The fan base was outraged and the Angels were crestfallen ... and they used the draft pick to get a bright-eyed kid from south Jersey named Michael Nelson Trout.

Trout then did things that seemed to mark him forever as the best player in Angels’ history. But ‘forever” doesn’t last as long as it used to. We’ll see if Ohtani can stretch time the way Baugh did.

Whicker: Angels' Shohei Ohtani is baseball’s “Slingin' Sammy” Baugh