Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning you’ll get a fresh, topical column to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
There was a point last year when it was easy to feel that Shohei Ohtani was simply a good baseball player.
Of course, “a good baseball player” is not a bad thing, no matter the context. But it could have felt like a bit of a letdown here. It was a revision of the old conventional wisdom on Ohtani—which was that he was a unicorn, a miracle, a revelation unto himself.