Snyder’s Soapbox: Travis Hunter isn’t the next Shohei Ohtani and those NFL Draft comparisons are misguided

Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.

I knew it was coming. All last fall, any time I saw Colorado football highlights or even just heard about the team, Travis Hunter being a two-way superstar came up and I knew it. I freaking knew it. When he won the Heisman Trophy, a feeling of inevitability swept over me.

Someone is going to bring up Shohei Ohtani. 

Sure enough, it has happened. 

“I think it’s, it’s a little bit like Ohtani, right?” Browns general manager Andrew Berry said last week.

No, not right. It’s really not like Ohtani at all. 

He isn’t alone, of course. Everyone’s been saying it. And they’re going to keep saying it. Ohtani is a two-way star and that means any time there’s someone else where the term “two-way star” can be applied, it’s going to happen. 

The thing is, it’s just different. It’s way different. 

This isn’t me being a hater of football. I love football. I’m a die-hard Bears fan and I grew up loving the NFL almost as much as Major League Baseball. I’m not being a “please like my sport” guy, either. I’m well aware that football dominates baseball in terms of popularity and mainstream consciousness and I’m not trying to carve into that. It’s fine. I’m not even going to attempt to discuss what is “harder” or more physically taxing. That just isn’t relevant. 

The issue is that the only position in football that’s even remotely comparable to pitcher is quarterback. The pitcher is the single most important player on the field and, yes, that’s the quarterback in football. 

I’m aware that pitchers in baseball only throw once every five or six days, but football is only played once a week. Still, if you wanted to go after the not-everyday comparison, that’s fine. 

You can compare a football player to Ohtani when he is one of the best — if not the best — defensive players in football (as Ohtani is arguably the best offensive player in baseball) and also serves as a well-above-average quarterback about one-fifth of the time. Yes, when Ohtani was fully healthy, he was an All-Star-level pitcher in addition to being one of the best forces in baseball at the plate. He’ll be that again once he gets back on the mound this season. 

So will Travis Hunter be the best defensive player in football or at least be part of the conversation? Maybe. If that happens, he’s also going to have to play like a top-12ish quarterback for about 3.5 games a year. Given that he’s very unlikely to ever play quarterback, it’s a worthless argument. 

Will we ever see anything like Ohtani in football? It’s insanely unlikely. You’d have to have someone like Taysom Hill become a full-time defensive player and excel at it. And even then, Hill wasn’t a good enough quarterback to merit such a conversation. Not even close. We’re talking about a Justin Herbert-level quarterback who also is a Patrick Surtain II-level defender. 

Yes, that’s how good Ohtani is. 

There’s nothing wrong with not being Ohtani. He’s a unicorn. No one in baseball has ever done this, post-integration. My hunch is we’ll never see anyone like him again in our lifetimes. To say Hunter isn’t Ohtani is far from an insult. He’s a special talent. He looks like he’ll be a great, two-way NFL player. It’ll be incredibly impressive if and when it happens. I’ll greatly enjoy watching him (other than when it inevitably hurts the Bears). 

He just won’t be Ohtani. No one is.