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I’ve been writing about Shohei Ohtani for 13 years. Even I could have never imagined this.

I woke this morning to the routine Twitter scroll, and at the top of my timeline was this:

About 10 hours before Bob’s tweet, there stood Shohei Ohtani, surrounded by his teammates and coaches and more than 50,000 home fans, accepting a trophy (at the expense of Bob’s team) as I entertained two thoughts:

• Man, it would have been so cool if Adolis Garcia was handed the ALCS MVP trophy at home rather than in Houston.

  (Or if Corey Seager had been named World Series MVP at home instead of in Phoenix.)

  (But mostly: Adolis.)

• Ohtani had just spent three hours writing not only the masterpiece of his singular career, but absolutely arguably the greatest performance, context considered, in the history of baseball.

(Photo by Rob Leiter/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

I texted Bob for a little help on what November 2017 moment he was referencing. Was it a tweet? A text? A story? A segment?

It, he said, had been this:

The link on that 2017 story I’d apparently written was broken, and I wasn’t quite ready to roll out of bed to go find it in the Bound Editions on my shelf.

So, first, I checked my phone to find the oldest text I had in which I’d mentioned Ohtani (or, as it turns out, “Otani”). It was five years before that.

Ohtani was 18 years old in 2012. He wouldn’t be posted by the Nippon Ham Fighters for another five years. There had been rumors, though, that he might skip the NPB draft and instead make himself available to sign with an MLB club, and I wrote about it then, on October 19, 2012:

Ohtani, of course, didn’t head to America in 2012 after all, and I didn’t spend time writing about him until it became clear early in 2017 that Nippon Ham were very likely to post him after that season. I wrote about him that spring and summer and fall. A lot.

There he was in a run-on sentence in April 2017.

And in a Ruben-JD phone call that May (which I think may have been more insane than the run-on).

Ohtani speculation made it into a bunch of other Newberg Reports throughout the 2017 season. In late November, though, I had news to write about: his agents had distributed parameters to interested MLB clubs on what it would take to sign him, aside from dollars.

On December 1, the Fighters officially posted Ohtani, and the next morning I wrote about one angle that I thought might prove to be a separator for the Rangers.

By the next day, Ohtani had already narrowed the field down considerably, and the Rangers were still in the mix.

Less than a week later, Ohtani had made his decision. I wrote a seven-word report.

Still, for some reason, though the above were among 15 stories I’d written about him between October 2012 and December 8, 2017, the “Buckle Up” story from November 10, 2017 failed to survive the archive transfer of all those old, pre-Athletic, Newberg Reports.

So I found the Word files for the 2019 Bound Edition (my final book before the World Series Edition), which spanned my stories from October 8, 2017 through October 11, 2018. Here is that November 10, 2017 story that Bob was referencing early this morning, after his Brewers’ season had ended on Shohei’s stage last night.

If anything, last night proved that the Shohei Experience is still in flight, and probably hasn’t even reached cruising altitude. Who’s to say he’s not going to outdo last night’s Game 4 performance over the next two weeks, once the Mariners — thought by some in 2017 to be the frontrunner to sign him — or the Blue Jays occupy the opposing dugout he salutes before his first at-bat?

I’d like to think that if the Rangers had landed Ohtani in December 2017, and he’d played at similar arbitration-driven salaries in 2021 and 2022 and 2023, that Texas still would have signed Seager and Marcus Semien after 2021. But maybe it would have been Seager alone, with Texas knowing that Ohtani would make Seager-like money in 2023 and then hit free agency after that season, commanding a landmark extension.

Seager and Semien finished second and third in the AL MVP race in 2023.

Ohtani finished first.

Fun to imagine how much better the Rangers might have been in 2023 — and in 2021 and 2022 — with Ohtani pitching and DH’ing. The mental gymnastics trying to work out scenarios in which they tried to keep him in place beyond 2023 are dizzying.

But no less dizzying than what we saw last night. Three home runs and a sick 6.0-2-0-0-3-10 pitching line doesn’t do the actual domination justice. It was a video game display, but only if the video game’s coding allows for the wildly unrealistic.

If that wasn’t the greatest individual performance in the history of the game, the list it’s on is short.

If he’s not the best baseball player in the history of the game, the list he’s on is probably even shorter.

(Photo by Mary DeCicco/MLB Photos via Getty Images)