MLB pitchers/hitters: Shohei Ohtani didn't have to be the only one
Author's note: There hasn't been a baseball player like Shohei Ohtani since Babe Ruth. Could there have been others? Matt Trowbridge asked that question to some of baseball's greatest two-way players in 1991, when Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders were doubling up as NFL/MLB stars. What they said then illustrates why it had to be a Japanese free agent who could dictate his own terms for baseball to have another pitching/hitting great. Here is that story from August 25, 1991, in the Rockford Register Star:
He may have been the best young-hitting prospect of the last 30 years. Better than his brother. Better than anyone.
But while brother George has hit his way to Cooperstown’s doorstep, the prospect never got a chance to show what he could do with a bat.
Ken Brett became a pitcher.
“My father regrets that I was never a hitter, but I don’t like to talk about that,” Ken says. “Would haves and could haves can drive you crazy.”
What Ken Brett did have was an 83-55 record with a 3.93 earned run average over 14 major-league seasons, pitching for 10 teams. An average of six wins per season, with a high of 13. Not bad. Not good. Certainly now what was expected of him. Certainly not greatness.
“It doesn’t bother me that I was a mediocre player and I had a lot more ability than that,” Brett says. “I had a lot of fun and I had a long career. Who knows if I had been a hitter if I would have made it? If I couldn’t, it could have been too late to become a pitcher.”
More: Who are Rockford's greatest baseball players? Our stories about all 12, all in one place
Three score and 13 years ago, Babe Ruth was given a chance to prove he could both pitch and hit. Seven decades later, Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders proved they could play baseball and football at the same time. But no one, not even college supernovas like Dave Winfield and John Olerud are allowed to pitch and play another position in the major leagues.
Why? Why can two players break tackles and hit curveballs but no players can throw fastballs and catch fly balls? Why can’t hitters-turned-pitchers like Bobby Thigpen of the Chicago White Sox or Toronto’s Dave Stieb still hit?
“Because it’s not up to the player. It’s up to the club,” says Winfield, an outfielder with the California Angels. “They set the guidelines.”
The ‘impossible’ dream
Five years ago, it was impossible to play two pro sports at once. Just as it was once impossible to sail around the world because the earth was flat. Only Bo knew differently. And Bo had leverage. If the Los Angeles Raiders wanted him to play football, they had to also let him play baseball. Vice versa for the Kansas City Royals.
Bo forced teams to allow him to prove the sports world was round.
More: Rockford’s greatest football players No. 1: Sean Considine Byron’s humble Super Bowl champ
Baseball-only players don’t have that leverage. The closest a baseball-only player has come is Frank Rodriguez.
Rodriguez was drafted by the Boston Red Sox as a pitcher in 1990. Rodriguez, a pitcher/shortstop for Howard (Texas) Junior College at the time, doesn’t want to be Nolan Ryan. He wants to be Ozzie Smith. Instead of signing, he went back to college. On the eve of the 1991 draft, the Red Sox signed him as a shortstop.
The Red Sox obviously think Rodriguez, who is hitting .289 with three homers and 22 RBIs at Class A Elmira, could become a major league pitcher. And a major league shortstop. Why not both?
“Pitchers pitch every five days,” Boston general manager Lou Gorman says. “If you also play in the field, you upset that routine.
“The competition is too complicated. It’s an impossible thing to do.”
Isn’t the NFL, with its two-ton playbooks, complicated? Why isn’t it too complicated to run to daylight and also run to first base?
“Those are two different seasons,” Gorman says. “You aren’t playing both at the same time. I challenge anyone to play baseball today and football tomorrow. That’s comparing apples and oranges.”
Modern-day Babe
Cito Gaston, Olerud’s manager in Toronto, says it is possible to pitch today and play outfield tomorrow.
“It just depends if the guy is as great as Babe Ruth,” Gaston says.
There is a player of Ruthian talent out there — Winfield.
Here is a player who was the greatest pitcher and hitter in his college’s history, a Larry Bird type who almost singlehandedly carried his school to the brink of an NCAA championship. His senior year, Winfield was 13-1 as a pitcher and batted over .400 for the Minnesota Gophers.
Winfield was also a starter on Minnesota’s Big Ten basketball team, was drafted by the NBA and NFL and has put up Hall of Fame numbers as an outfielder. But, like Ken Brett not being allowed to hit, Winfield has never been allowed to pitch in the pros.
“Winfield could have pitched,” San Francisco Giants manager Roger Craig said. “Winfield would have been the one.”
Half the population of Minneapolis thinks so too. During his first four years in the majors with the San Diego Padres, Winfield would return home and want to talk about his home runs. His friends talked about something else.
“They were always saying, ‘When are you going to pitch?’ ” Winfield said. “I had pitched all my life. But the Padres wanted me to play every day. So you go along with the program.”
Winfield pauses. Reflects. Grows wistful.
“One time, one time before my career is over,” he says, “I’d like to get on the mound and let someone photograph me out there as a pitcher at the major league level. Then I will be satisfied.”
Too much to lose
Winfield isn’t a pitcher for the same reason Babe Ruth had to step off the mound in 1920.
Ruth, the best young, left-handed pitcher in the American League at the time, was 5-0 in 14 years as a Yankee after being 89-46 in five years with the Red Sox. Despite a 2.28 career earned run average, Ruth was deemed too valuable as a hitter to have him risk injury as a pitcher.
“Teams pay you so much money now they don’t want you to get injured doing something you don’t do all the time,” Winfield says. “There would be tremendous controversy if that happened.”
“Winfield is too good,” Roger Craig says. “You won’t see a guy play every day for four days and then pitch on the fifth day. You’ll never see that.”
Craig says if you see a pitcher/hitter, it will be someone like Ken Brett. Or the Giants' Don Robinson. A good, but not great, pitcher who has proven in the National League that he can also hit.
“Don could do it,” Craig says. “He could be a DH, too, if he played in the American League.
“And Ken Brett was an outstanding hitter. There’s a guy who might have been a better hitter than he was a pitcher. Who knows? Nobody will ever know.”
True calling
That is the most compelling reason the Ken Bretts, Dave Winfields and Babe Ruths should both pitch and hit: to know what they’re best at.
Ruth was a great pitcher. He learned he was an even greater hitter. Lefty O’Doul, whose .349 lifetime batting average is the fourth-best of all time, also began his major league career as a pitcher. Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Lemon (207-128, 3.23 ERA) began as a third baseman.
“I had never pitched in the minors,” Lemon said. “Just a little in high school and in the Navy.
“But I could never have done both. I had enough problems with just one position.”
That’s why Lemon was switched. He didn’t hit well enough (.232, 37 HR, 147 RBIs in 1,183 career at-bats) to make it at third base. That’s also why Toronto shifted Stieb from an outfielder to a pitcher in the minors. And why the Chicago Cubs moved Jim Bullinger, who hit .169, 192, .216 and .143 at his last four minor-league stops, from shortstop to pitcher this year. As a pitcher, Bullinger is 12-11 at Class AA and AAA.
“It’s much easier to start at a position and then convert him to a pitcher than vice versa, because of hitting,” Boston’s Gorman says. “Hitting a baseball is possibly the most difficult thing in the world. It might take you 10 years to learn how to hit again. By then, you are retired.
“Players can switch positions (as a hitter or pitcher). But you can’t do both. Each position is too demanding.”
Lucky injury
Gorman says if it were possible to do both at the same time, someone would have done it since Babe Ruth.
Someone did do it in the minors — Hall of Famer Stan Musial.
Musial fit Roger Craig’s profile. He was a pitcher first, like Ruth. And he fit Craig’s fear; he got hurt making a diving catch in the outfield.
Musial thought his career was over. But his manager, Dick Kerr, didn’t believe in quitting. Kerr, who won two World Series games in 1919 for a Chicago White Sox team that was trying to lose, convinced the injured minor leaguer to try and make it as a hitter.
“When Stan Musial hurt his arm,” Lemon says, “it was a godsend.”
Musial went on to hit .331 with 475 home runs and 1,951 RBIs.
Paul “Big Poison” Waner (.333) was another minor league pitcher who hurt his arm and was converted into a Hall of Fame outfielder.
“Pitching and hitting wouldn’t be that hard to do,” Ken Brett says. “All you would need is a lot of batting practice. That’s not going to take away from your pitching. It would just take away from time spent shagging flies in the outfield.
“It’s something that could be done. But it would need the whole-hearted endorsement of management.”
Politically incorrect
It likely would not get the endorsement of the rest of the team. Just as Bo Jackson’s playing football created animosity with his baseball teammates in Kansas City, a pitcher who hits or a hitter who pitches could make enemies.
“You are taking somebody’s job,” says Roger Craig, who was once hounded by slugger Dave Kingman, who wanted Craig to turn him into a pitcher. “The Players Association might not like that.”
Pittsburgh players did not like it in 1974 when Ken Brett pinch-hit 15 times. And it was not because Brett, a .262 career hitter with 10 homers and 44 RBIs, came through with only three hits.
“There were a lot of guys on that team who had hard feelings when I hit for the pitcher instead of them,” Brett says. “They did not like it. They thought it was their job.
“There is no doubt I could have done both. In 1973, ’74 and ’75, I was a better hitter than a couple of guys on that team. Unfortunately, I was a pitcher.”
A few years later, it was academic. Brett was no longer a good hitter.
“I don’t care how good a hitter you are, if you are a pitcher you turn into a lousy hitter,” Brett says. “You forget because you don’t hit.
“Besides, they don’t want you to hit anyway. All they want you to do is bunt.”
Hope for the future
That may change if enough hitters can’t hit. Or, more likely, if there aren’t enough pitchers. Baseball’s most common complaint — even above spiraling salaries — is a lack of quality pitching. That situation got even tighter in 1993 when the National League added two expansion teams.
“If an expansion team really needed pitching and had somebody who could do both, that might be the one situation where it happens,” says Toronto first baseman John Olerud, who set six hitting and four pitching records at Washington State when he was the NCAA player of the year in 1988. “With me, we’ve got so many good pitchers, it doesn’t make much sense.
“But it would be fun to see. It definitely would be different.”
Frank Rodriguez, pitcher/shortstop for next year’s expansion Florida Marlins. Or maybe John Olerud, pitcher/first baseman for the Colorado Rockies.
“I’d like to see it,” Ken Brett says, “but it’s not something I’m looking forward to because I don’t think it will happen.”
“Baseball,” Olerud says, “believes in specialization.”
Contact: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com, @matttrowbridge or 815-987-1383. Matt Trowbridge has covered sports for the Rockford Register Star for over 30 years, after previous stints in North Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Iowa City
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Why there were no pitching/hitting stars between Babe Ruth and Ohtani
