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We never admit it, we are wrong about almost everything all of the time, and we cloak it as We mistake mystery for depth. We mistake tradition for truth. We mistake certainty for insight. And maybe the biggest mistake is believing our metaphysics are less flawed than our mechanics.
by Simon Dodson
Here’s the problem we keep pretending not to notice: we’ve spent the last fifteen years watching entire political systems collapse in plain sight, exposing themselves as toxic, useless, and fundamentally broken.
Everyone knows it. Everyone sees it.
And yet nothing changes, because maybe we’re wrong about everything almost all the time — and sometimes we’re wrong every single damn time — and we know it.
We just won’t do a thing about it. We cling to the wreckage out of habit, not conviction.
And that’s why Shohei Ohtani matters more than people think.
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That’s what Ohtani really represents:
The proof that our assumptions about possibility are almost always wrong
and that history moves forward only when someone refuses to inherit the limits the rest of us accept.
Part One: You Must Understand
There’s something almost embarrassing about how people talk about Shohei Ohtani. Not because they underrate him, but because the language they still use predates the world he actually plays in. We say “two-way player” like it’s 1919. We compare him to Babe Ruth as if comparing an electric car to a steam engine clarifies anything. We treat him as a glitch instead of what he really is: the first fully realised human being in a sport that spent a century insisting humans must be incomplete.
Most athletes become great by maximising what’s possible inside their assigned lane.
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Ohtani became great by refusing the lane entirely.
The Statistical Absurdity Nobody Can Explain
Doing one of his jobs at his level would be a full career.
He is a top-five hitter and a top-five pitcher — simultaneously.
That isn’t “rare.” It’s structurally contradictory.
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His WAR seasons aren’t historic because they’re high; they’re historic because they pull from two incompatible universes of difficulty at once. It’s like if someone beat you in chess and then beat you again playing as the pieces you weren’t using.
Baseball never had a category for this because baseball never allowed it to exist.
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The Bureaucracy Was Always the Real Opponent
This is the part most fans misunderstand.
Ohtani isn’t unusual because of his body.
He’s unusual because every other system would’ve broken him.
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Baseball’s two-lane identity — pitcher or hitter — wasn’t biology. It was bureaucracy. Workload charts, bullpen roles, development silos, coaching doctrine. Everything was optimised around the assumption that dual mastery was impossible.
Japan was the outlier.
They didn’t just recognise the anomaly; they engineered a cradle-to-career ecosystem to protect it. They treated Ohtani like a national project, not an administrative inconvenience.
The real truth is obvious once you see it:
Ohtani didn’t defy human limits. He defied baseball’s paperwork.
The Shohei Ohtani Problem: Greatness We Still Don’t Understand
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There’s something almost embarrassing about how people talk about Shohei Ohtani. Not because they underrate him, but because the language they still use predates the world he actually plays in. We say “two-way player” like it’s 1919. We compare him to Babe Ruth as if comparing an electric car to a steam engine clarifies anything. We treat him as a glitch instead of what he really is: the first fully realised human being in a sport that spent a century insisting humans must be incomplete.
Most athletes become great by maximising what’s possible inside their assigned lane.
Ohtani became great by refusing the lane entirely.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
The Statistical Absurdity Nobody Can Explain
Doing one of his jobs at his level would be a full career.
He is a top-five hitter and a top-five pitcher — simultaneously.
That isn’t “rare.” It’s structurally contradictory.
His WAR seasons aren’t historic because they’re high; they’re historic because they pull from two incompatible universes of difficulty at once. It’s like if someone beat you in chess and then beat you again playing as the pieces you weren’t using.
Baseball never had a category for this because baseball never allowed it to exist.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
The Bureaucracy Was Always the Real Opponent
This is the part most fans misunderstand.
Ohtani isn’t unusual because of his body.
He’s unusual because every other system would’ve broken him.
Baseball’s two-lane identity — pitcher or hitter — wasn’t biology. It was bureaucracy. Workload charts, bullpen roles, development silos, coaching doctrine. Everything was optimised around the assumption that dual mastery was impossible.
Japan was the outlier.
They didn’t just recognise the anomaly; they engineered a cradle-to-career ecosystem to protect it. They treated Ohtani like a national project, not an administrative inconvenience.
The real truth is obvious once you see it:
Ohtani didn’t defy human limits. He defied baseball’s paperwork.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Greatness Isn’t What He Is — It’s What Baseball Refused to Be
This is the thesis buried under everything:
Ohtani’s greatness doesn’t prove what he is. It proves what baseball refused to imagine.
Every rule the sport clung to — pitchers can’t hit, hitters can’t pitch, dual roles break bodies — wasn’t evidence-based.
It was tradition-based.
It was inertia dressed up as expertise.
The sport wasn’t waiting for a unicorn.
It was waiting for a system that didn’t immediately kill one.
The Closest Things We’ve Ever Seen — and Why They Still Fail
Across the entire landscape of sport, only a handful of achievements even rhyme with Ohtani’s:
- Bo Jackson was an All-Star and a Pro Bowler — but he didn’t pitch 100 mph and hit fourth in the same game.
- Deion Sanders played in a World Series and won a Super Bowl — but he wasn’t mastering two oppositional skill identities concurrently.
- Michael Jordan switched sports — he didn’t perform both at elite levels simultaneously.
- Usain Bolt tried soccer — he didn’t run world-class sprint times between Premier League fixtures.
- Babe Ruth pitched and hit — but never at modern workloads, and never simultaneously at elite tiers.
The closest analogy would require the impossible:
Patrick Mahomes playing shutdown corner while still being the best quarterback alive.
LeBron leading the league in scoring while anchoring a defense as its center.
Djokovic winning Wimbledon and the French Open on the same afternoon.
We have never seen this.
We do not have a category for it.
And that’s the point.
A Mirror Held Up by the One Man Qualified to Comment
That’s why Deion Sanders’ comment after Colorado’s latest win landed so cleanly. When he was told about Ohtani’s Game Four performance, he didn’t bother with stats or historical recall. He just said what mattered: he’s special, and maybe his real value is the door he opens — the one that finally ends the rule that you can only be one thing.
Coming from someone who actually lived dual greatness, that’s the only definition that withstands scrutiny:
true greatness expands the permissions of the system.
The Real Takeaway: Legacy Rules Are Bullshit — and We’re Wrong Almost Every Time
Here’s the uncomfortable truth hiding underneath all of this:
legacy rules are bullshit, and we are wrong about almost everything almost every time.
Baseball wasn’t protecting careers.
It was protecting assumptions.
Pitchers can’t hit? Wrong.
Hitters can’t pitch? Wrong.
Dual roles break bodies? Wrong.
Systems can’t support contradictions? Wrong.
Ohtani didn’t invalidate the rules.
He exposed the rules as guesses that hardened into commandments.
He is the reminder that human potential didn’t have a ceiling —
only our imagination did.
And if baseball was this wrong about something this obvious for this long,
you have to wonder what else we’re catastrophically wrong about but simply haven’t met the Ohtani for yet.
History is a pile of confidently held beliefs that age into comedy.
Human flight was impossible — until it wasn’t.
Four-minute miles were unbreakable — until they weren’t.
AI would never write coherence — until it did.
Our certainty is just ignorance with better branding.
The Existential Pivot: Gravity vs the Soul
A hundred years from now, when people look back in the rearview mirror of our era, it’s possible they’ll see gravity as more fundamental than whatever we called “the soul.” Not because gravity changed — but because our sense of meaning was always anchored to the wrong place. We mistake mystery for depth. We mistake tradition for truth. We mistake certainty for insight. And maybe the biggest mistake of all is believing our metaphysics are somehow less flawed than our mechanics.
That’s what Ohtani really represents:
the proof that our assumptions about possibility are almost always wrong,
and that the universe rewards the rare person who refuses to inherit the limits the rest of us accept.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
He didn’t just beat baseball.
He embarrassed its assumptions.
He proved the game wasn’t constrained by biology —
it was constrained by imagination.
And that’s the part we still don’t have language for.
Only evidence.
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We’ve lived through the proof of this already. The last fifteen years have shown us that entire political systems can rot from the inside out, become toxic, useless, and obviously broken — and everyone still carries on as if they work.
Maybe that’s the real pattern: we’re wrong about everything almost all the time, and sometimes we’re wrong every single damn time, and we know it. We just never do anything about it.
Which is why Ohtani’s existence hits with such force: he exposes the same flaw. The rules weren’t real. The limits weren’t real. The certainty wasn’t real.
It was all belief — and belief was wrong.
