Babe truth
SHOHEI Ohtani pitches, hits and apparently hustles.
It feels now like all of spring training for the Japanese phenom was a sandbag, an effort to lower expectations after he arrived with about as much fanfare as any player in quite a while.
I saw the righty pitch against — wait for it — the Tijuana Toros on March 9 in Tempe, Ariz., and if you watched the actions on the pitches without looking at who was delivering them you could have been convinced it was, say, Jordan Zimmermann, but certainly not someone who 30 teams were ready to do everything short of changing naming rights on their stadium for.
He was beat up that day by a bunch of players far from the majors in every way, throwing in the low 90s and talking afterward about the need to better familiarize himself with different-sized baseballs and different-shaped mounds.
That blended into a spring in which he hit poorly (4-for-32 without an extrabase hit) and pitched worse (nine runs in 2 2/3 innings in games against actual major league teams). There were calls for him to go to the minors or just concentrate on pitching or that this all was an elaborate hoax because no player had extensively pitched and hit in the same season since 1919 so this was darn near impossible — especially because that player was the actual Babe Ruth and not nicknamed the Babe Ruth of Japan.
And then the season started, and like an illusionist he has quickly made the spring disappear.
He has homered in three of the four games in which he has batted. He pitched well in his debut in Oakland on — fittingly — April Fool’s Day. And then Sunday, Ohtani was almost downright perfect.
Ohtani showed his slider, but mainly used the devastating combination of high-octane fastball and disappearing split to retire the first 19 A’s he faced. Marcus Semien then lined a clean single to left in the seventh inning and Jed Lowrie walked. But the 23-year-old then induced Khris Davis to ground back to the mound before registering his 12th strikeout to end his effort in an eventual 6-1 Angels’ win.
Ohtani threw 91 pitches and got swings and misses on 24. He averaged 96.5 mph with his fastball — reaching or topping 99 four times — and got a swing and miss on nearly half of the splitters he threw, 16-of-34.
So, at this moment he has a 2.08 ERA, a 1.310 OPS and a growing group of believers. Obviously, he will have to expand his success beyond the A’s.
But there is no doubt Ohtani is showing the power on both sides of the ball that had so many trying to seduce him to their franchise. He has a touch now of Mark Fidrych and Fernando Valenzuela about him, which is to say a chance to be the biggest star in the game in his rookie year. To have a baseball year remembered specifically for him.
In the offseason, the two biggest additions and, thus, the two biggest players to watch in 2018 were Ohtani by the Angels and Giancarlo Stanton by the Yankees. And it has been Stanton — who only switched from the NL to the AL — who has to date flopped, a strikeout machine evoking boos in The Bronx. He has not done well honoring the legacy of the great slugger imported by the Yankees, a lineage that began with Ruth.
Meanwhile, nearly 7,000 miles from home — and what feels that distance now from spring training — Ohtani has appeared both comfortable and dominant hitting and pitching.
Two weeks into this experiment he has met the greatest hopes. Ohtani has been Ruthian. joel.sherman@nypost.com