Stephen A. Smith embarrasses himself with this Shohei Ohtani take

Stephen A. Smith dropped perhaps the worst take in baseball history on Monday morning while discussing LA Angels‘ two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani.

He thinks that Shohei Ohtani being the face of baseball is bad because he needs an interpreter:

This take will go down in history as one of the worst, if not the worst, in baseball history.

LA Angels’ DH/SP Shohei Ohtani is perfect as the face of baseball.

According to Smith, it doesn’t matter that LA Angels’ two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani is hitting .279/.364/.698 with 70 RBI (as a two-hole hitter) and a Major League-leading 33 home runs because he needs an interpreter.

It also doesn’t matter to Smith that Ohtani also made the All-Star team as not only the starting DH but as the AL starting pitcher too. To Smith, it doesn’t matter what anyone does if they need an interpreter.

I don’t think anybody with a working brain could agree with what Stephen A. is saying. He even claimed to his co-worker Max Kellerman (who rightfully argued with him), that he knows his baseball. Well, that’s clearly not true.

The ignorance that Smith showed over this ridiculous opinion shows that he most likely hasn’t watched a single inning of Angels baseball this year. In fact, in his speech, he questioned his host, Molly Qerim, over how many Angels games she’s watched this year.

She expressed that she has in fact watched many Angels games this year. We all have, as Ohtani has delivered the ten most watched regular season games this season. The only one who hasn’t watched Ohtani is clearly Stephen A.

The worst part about this isn’t even that he said it doesn’t help that Ohtani is the face of the game while needing an interpreter. It’s that he actually also said that it “contributes to harming the game”:

This is rubbing basically everyone the wrong way. It’s disappointing when this stuff happens, especially when it’s somebody who’s been in sports media for so long and has held such prestigious positions for quite some time.

In a year where baseball has been drowning in all the “sticky stuff” drama and all the talk that the sport is dying, Ohtani has provided an unbelievable amount of juice to this game. For Smith to say that Ohtani has hurt baseball by needing an interpreter couldn’t be more false.

Baseball hasn’t been played at this level since Babe Ruth was around, and maybe hasn’t been played at this level ever. Many people say that this sport is ‘dying,’ and Ohtani has been breathing life into it all season.

What an embarrassing take from Stephen A.