Ohtani, Ruth and Bonds: the numbers that dismantle the “greatest ever” myth

Nobody disputes Shohei Ohtani's talent. The argument starts when he's called the greatest of all time, and when he's called one of a kind.

Open any social network after a Shohei Ohtani home run and you'll find the phrase: “the greatest ballplayer in history.” And its most common variant, the one that tries to sound cautious: “only comparable to Babe Ruth.”

It's a claim repeated so often that hardly anyone checks it anymore.

Let's check it.

The number nobody cites

There's a statistic designed precisely to answer this question: WAR (Wins Above Replacement), which measures how many wins a player adds to his team above what a run-of-the-mill minor leaguer at his position would provide.

It rolls hitting, defense, baserunning and pitching into a single number. It isn't perfect, but it's the closest thing baseball has to a single yardstick.

The all-time career WAR leaderboard reads like this:

• Babe Ruth: 182.6 career WAR (1st all-time)
• Walter Johnson: 167.8 career WAR (2nd all-time)
• Cy Young: 163.6 career WAR (3rd all-time)
• Barry Bonds: 162.8 career WAR (4th all-time)
• Willie Mays: 156.2 career WAR (5th all-time)
• Shohei Ohtani: 55.7 career WAR (~245th all-time)

Figures from Baseball-Reference, updated through 2026.

It isn't a close debate.

They aren't even in the same room.

Ohtani shares a line with Chet Lemon, Jimmy Wynn and Joe Mauer: very good players, none of whom comes up in a “greatest ever” conversation.

What Ohtani has done

We have to be fair, because the argument loses force if it's exaggerated.

Ohtani has led important categories, and several of them.

2023, American League: home run champion with 44, and also the leader in on-base percentage, slugging, OPS, extra-base hits and total bases. He was only the second player in Angels history to win a home run crown, along with Troy Glaus.

2024, National League: the 50-50 year. He led in home runs (54), RBIs (130), runs scored (134, the highest total in all of baseball) and slugging.

2025: he led in total bases, though he fell short of the home run crown: Kyle Schwarber hit 56 and he hit 55.

Four MVP awards. A 50-50 club that didn't exist before him.

That's a Hall of Fame career, and it will be one.

The 50-50 comes with fine print

Now, the signature achievement deserves context, because almost nobody mentions it: in 2024 Ohtani didn't play a single inning in the field or throw a single pitch.

He was coming off elbow surgery, and the Dodgers used him the entire season as a pure designated hitter.

Four or five plate appearances a night, and the rest of the game on the bench.

Compare that with the members of the 40-40 club, the previous rung: José Canseco and Barry Bonds did it while patrolling the outfield every day. Alex Rodríguez did it playing shortstop, the most demanding position in the infield.

Alfonso Soriano and Ronald Acuña Jr. did it from the outfield as well; Acuña, in fact, stole 73 bases in his 41-73 season while playing right field every day.

All of them reached their numbers carrying the physical toll of covering a position for nine innings, game after game.

Ohtani reached 50-50 with the freshest legs of any elite baserunner in the history of the feat: no defense, no mound, nothing wearing down his body between at-bats.

That doesn't erase the 50-50. It remains an extraordinary mark.

But it does put it where it belongs: it isn't quite the same feat when it's accomplished in more comfortable conditions than any of his predecessors had.

And it's exactly the kind of nuance the myth machine never puts in the headline.

The pitcher who never led the league in anything

This is where the myth cracks, because the comparison with Ruth rests entirely on the idea of the two-way player.

Ohtani has never led his league in wins, ERA or strikeouts. Not once.

The closest he's come are rate stats: strikeouts per nine innings in 2022 and opponents' batting average in 2023.

He has around 40 career wins on the mound.

Babe Ruth, before becoming the hitter everyone remembers, won 94 games with a 2.28 ERA and led the American League in ERA.

Later, as a full-time hitter, he led the league in home runs twelve times.

Twelve.

Ohtani has two.

What Bonds did still has no answer

If the conversation is about the best in history and not the most unusual, there's one name that gets cited far less than it should:

7 MVP awards. Nobody else in history has more than four.

762 career home runs, still the record.

73 home runs in a season, still the record.

2,558 walks and 688 intentional walks, both still records.

A .609 on-base percentage in 2004, still the record.

8 Gold Gloves and 514 stolen bases, in the same body.

And before the conversation veers toward steroids, which is where it always veers, it's worth remembering an uncomfortable fact: Bonds was already a three-time MVP and a member of the 400-homer, 400-steal club before anyone had uttered the word BALCO.

That player, the Pittsburgh Pirates version, was already a Hall of Famer.

Not one of a kind, either: ask Martín Dihigo

There's one more pillar of the myth to examine: the idea that a two-way player is something baseball had never seen before and will never see again.

Cuba has the answer, and his name is Martín Dihigo.

El Inmortal, The Immortal, pitched and hit at an elite level, not as a curiosity but as simultaneous dominance: twice in his career, once in Cuba and once in Mexico, he was both the top pitcher and the batting champion in the same season.

Ohtani hasn't done that even once.

Dihigo also played every position on the field, threw the first no-hitter in Mexican League history, and never set foot in the major leagues for one reason only: he was Black, and the color line kept him out.

Even so, he is enshrined in the halls of fame of Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Cooperstown, the only player with that collection.

In other words: the two-way player at the highest level already existed, and he was Cuban.

What didn't exist was an industry willing to let him in.

And today?

Two-way talent keeps coming.

Every year the draft brings in kids who hit and pitch at an elite level in college.

What does MLB do with them?

It makes them choose.

The modern development doctrine is total specialization: the kid with the arm gets steered to the mound, the kid with the bat gets the ball taken out of his hand.

The scale is never left balanced. It's tipped on purpose, because organizations see developing both ways as an unnecessary risk to their investment.

With one exception.

Just one.

So why did they let Ohtani do it?

Because in his case the experiment came with a market of 125 million people behind it.

Ohtani's rarity isn't a miracle of nature: it's a business decision.

MLB manufactures scarcity by specializing everyone else, and then sells the only one it allowed not to specialize as an unprecedented phenomenon.

Unprecedented he is not.

The precedent was born in 1906 in Cidra, Matanzas, and grew up a hundred meters from Palmar de Junco, the field where, according to tradition, the first baseball game in Cuba was played.

Two-way baseball and Cuban baseball grew up in the same neighborhood.

So where does the myth come from?

From a fairly specific place: Ohtani is today the highest-paid athlete in endorsements in the history of sports.

In 2026 he earns $2 million in salary and about $125 million in sponsorships.

The second-highest-paid player off the field is at around $10 million.

Before him, a ballplayer's endorsement ceiling was that same number, the one Derek Jeter and Ichiro Suzuki reached at their peak.

That apparatus wasn't built because Ohtani is the greatest of all time.

It was built because he's the only one they allowed to be what he is (the scarcity MLB itself manufactures, as we saw above) and because there's a Japanese market of 125 million people whose brands pay to reach it.

But once it's built, that apparatus has an enormous financial interest in sustaining the narrative.

Rarity sells better than greatness.

And in Ohtani's case, the rarity is completely real.

The verdict

Shohei Ohtani is an extraordinary ballplayer, and his plaque in Cooperstown is guaranteed.

He's eight seasons in and just turned 31. If he keeps up this level for another decade, this conversation changes completely.

But today, with the numbers on the table, calling him the greatest ballplayer in history isn't a debatable opinion: it's a claim the statistics don't support from any angle.

The best business baseball has ever had is not the same thing as the best ballplayer baseball has ever had.

Recta Al Pecho, “Hypocrisy in Baseball” section. Data cited in this article from Baseball-Reference, MLB.com and Sportico.