I just got a calendar reminder that I set a little more than a year ago, to make fun of my friend Daniel. "There's no way a major league team will let Shohei Ohtani hit," he swore to me last spring. "Zero chance. Way too risky."
At the time, that was a fairly common, if not quite universal, sentiment. It was too risky. Ohtani was a potentially special pitcher, and you don't take chances with special pitchers. Just a year later, though, the crazy, risky suggestion would be the opposite: stopping the two-way experiment.