Before Shohei Ohtani, Michael Lorenzen wanted to be a two-way player. But he’s found his calling as a starter.

Six years ago, as nearly every team in baseball prepared a sales pitch to lure Shohei Ohtani from Japan, the Reds asked Michael Lorenzen to record a short video in which he would explain why Cincinnati could provide the best opportunity for one player to thrive as both a pitcher and a hitter.

“I was actually annoyed,” Lorenzen said, “that they wanted me to do it.”

It wasn’t that Lorenzen didn’t believe Ohtani was worth his time. On the contrary, the son of one of the Reds’ coaches turned him on to the two-way sensation earlier in 2017, prompting him to wander down the YouTube rabbit hole of highlight videos and declare, “Dang, this guy’s the real deal.”

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But from the day he got drafted as the 38th overall pick in 2013 and signed for $1.5 million, Lorenzen had tried to talk the Reds into letting him play center field when he wasn’t pitching. They didn’t bite. In 2½ seasons in the minors, he received a total of 50 plate appearances, all as a pitcher. (Remember those bygones days when National League pitchers had to bat?) It wasn’t a representative sample of his hitting ability.

So, consider the irony — the nerve, too — of many of those club officials who wouldn’t give in to Lorenzen requesting his help to recruit Ohtani.

“All they ever told me was that it was impossible. ‘No one can do it. It’s impossible,’” Lorenzen recalled. “And then they wanted me to basically lay out all the reasons why it was possible. That was really frustrating for me.”

To be fair, sticking to pitching has worked out. In the last two offseasons, Lorenzen signed a pair of one-year contracts with the Angels and Tigers totaling $15.5 million. He got traded to the Phillies at the Aug. 1 deadline and chucked a 124-pitch no-hitter eight days later. He has a 3.69 ERA in a career-high 131⅔ innings innings this season, and with a strong finishing kick, the 31-year-old righty stands to cash in with a multiyear deal as a free agent.

But when Sho-Time rolls into town Monday — no offense to former Phillies prospects Logan O’Hoppe and Mickey Moniak, but the Angels really are all about Ohtani, especially while Mike Trout remains injured — Lorenzen will again feast his eyes on the best player in baseball and probably feel a twinge of what might have been. Because even though Ohtani tore an elbow ligament Wednesday and will only hit for the rest of the season, his simultaneous two-way excellence (.304, 44 homers, seven triples, 1.069 on-base plus slugging entering the weekend, plus 3.14 ERA, 167 strikeouts in 132 innings) is unlike anything baseball has seen.

“He has all the tools, and he’s a really smart guy and a guy who’s obsessed with his craft,” said Lorenzen, who got to know Ohtani with the Angels last season. “That’s what you need to be a two-way guy. You need to be obsessed with this game, obsessed with being great, obsessed with taking care of yourself to be able to manage the workload. I mean, he was writing down when he was a kid, ‘I want to be a major league All-Star.’ This is what he was born to do, this is what he wants to do, and no one should get in his way of doing that.

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“I would still love to do it. I think it just hasn’t made sense for a team to allow me to do it.”

Maybe it will still happen for Lorenzen, eventually. But his best chance at being a dual threat might have already passed him by.

In college, Lorenzen actually preferred center field to pitching. But although the muscular right-handed hitter batted .322 with 11 homers and 45 stolen bases in three seasons at Cal State Fullerton, the Reds were enticed by his 1.61 ERA and 35 saves and promised a rapid ascension through the minors as a pitcher.

Lorenzen reached the big leagues in fewer than two years — and as a starter, no less, before moving to the bullpen in 2016. The Reds gave him occasional at-bats as a pinch-hitter. He even homered against then-Phillies reliever Adam Morgan in 2017. Still, the idea of two-way play wasn’t broached.

The pinch-hit at-bats grew more frequent in 2018, and Lorenzen clocked four homers, two as a pinch-hitter. He played one inning in right field, the precursor to six starts in center late in the 2019 season.

At last, the Reds seemed open to experimenting.

“What the last month did is confirmed that I held him back too much before that point,” Reds manager David Bell said at the winter meetings in 2019. “I don’t have any regrets, but at the same time, it showed that this guy’s an elite athlete. He’s capable of helping us in more ways than just on the mound, which I think I had to see it to believe it. As much as I talked about giving him that opportunity, there’s some hesitation there.”

The Reds added to the outfield that offseason, though, signing Nick Castellanos and bringing in Shogo Akiyama from Japan, so Lorenzen got only a few innings during the 2020 pandemic mini-season.

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But the real dagger to Lorenzen’s two-way dream came in 2021. After missing the first 91 games with a shoulder strain, he pitched one inning of relief in his first game back, then stayed in as an outfielder and strained his hamstring while tagging up from third base on a sacrifice fly.

“Hurting myself tagging up from third was the worst thing that could’ve happened for me,” Lorenzen said. “Even though I came back in literally 10 days, 11 days, whatever it was, it was like, ‘Whoa, whoa!’ It was just the business aspect of it. ‘We need you to pitch and eat innings and throw innings. If you get hurt … .’”

Lorenzen missed 11 games. Upon his return, he only pitched. He hasn’t played the outfield again.

“He’s so athletic and so talented that sometimes, if you want the world, he can hit, he can play outfield, he can pitch,” Castellanos said. “But it seems like he’s really bought into the role of, ‘I’m a starting pitcher. This is how I go about my day, this is how I go about my work, this is what I do.’”

Would the Phillies consider letting him hit?

“No,” manager Rob Thomson said before the question was fully asked.

Lorenzen has made his peace with perhaps never getting the chance again.

Last year, when Lorenzen arrived for spring training with the Angels, his locker was stocked with bats that the team ordered for him. He even took batting practice on the first day of camp.

Just like Ohtani.

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“Then I had my meeting with the front office to go over what my plans were and [general manager] Perry [Minasian] was like, ‘I know you hit yesterday. No more.’ I was like, ‘I have bats and a helmet in my locker, so I didn’t know.’ From my point of view, it was like, if Shohei got hurt running the bases and the next day I get hit by a pitch and I’m down, now you’re down two rotation pieces and none of it was from pitching. It was like, ‘If you’re going to be a starter, we can’t be down a starter on a one-year deal.’”

And make no mistake, after all those years of plugging holes without a defined role in the Reds bullpen, being a starter is Lorenzen’s highest priority.

Given a chance to start again last season, Lorenzen posted a 4.24 ERA in 97⅔ innings and missed two months with a strained shoulder. But he finished strong, parlaying a 2.36 ERA in five September starts into an opportunity to start for the Tigers.

Key word: Start.

“There were some teams that were interested in giving me at-bats this offseason,” Lorenzen said. “But it was more of like a hybrid style of play, and I’m like, ‘No, I need to be a starter.’ I need to just prove that I’m a starter. I’ve never had a chance to do that in my entire career.

“My rookie year was my second year full-time pitching. I didn’t know the difference from a two-seam fastball to a four-seam fastball, at least how to throw it. So, to me, I didn’t fail as a starter; I just didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t have any help. I need to be a full-time starter and prove it.

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“If I was going to choose between being a bullpen guy and playing the field every once in a while or be a starter, I was going to pick being a starter all day every day.”

But one thought is never far away, especially while Ohtani was unleashing 100-mph fastballs in addition to crushing 430-foot homers in the most dominant all-around season ever.

“I would try and get [Tigers manager] A.J. Hinch to let me hit,” Lorenzen said, laughing. “I was like, ‘Man, maybe I’ll go to Japan and do the two-way thing for two years and prove it and then come back over.’ If I really wanted to do it, that really would be the way to do it, to be honest.”