Forget what Shohei Ohtani has done until now, which includes three MVP awards, a World Series ring and MLB’s only 50-50 season. We just watched “The Ohtani Game.”
Despite a ho-hum performance in the first three games of the series, the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar was named NLCS MVP on Friday after one of the greatest single-game performances in the history of not just baseball but all of team sports.
With his team already up 3-0 in the series, Ohtani reached his apex as a two-way player in Game 4, with three homers at the plate and 10 strikeouts in six scoreless innings on the mound. Unprecedented doesn’t begin to describe what he just did in a delirious night at Chavez Ravine, which ended with a 5-1 Dodgers win.
It all started with a first inning that, by itself, might have been the best single inning ever from a player. Ohtani took the mound for his second career postseason start and worked around a leadoff walk with three straight strikeouts against the most dangerous part of the Brewers’ lineup.
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Jackson Chourio? He went down swinging on a 100.3-mph fastball. Christian Yelich? Frozen on a 100.2-mph fastball. William Conteras? Wiped out on three pitches, the last of them a nasty, 87.6-mph sweeper.
Unlike every other starting pitcher in MLB, Ohtani’s responsibilities didn’t end after throwing a scoreless first inning. He proceeded to don a batting helmet and hit a leadoff homer off Brewers counterpart José Quintana.
And by “hit,” we mean he smashed the ball 446 feet and 115.6 mph deep into the right-field pavilion at Dodger Stadium.
Three innings later, Ohtani one-upped that homer by demolishing a cutter from Brewers reliever Chad Patrick, sending the ball past the right-field pavilion.
That homer? 469 feet and 116.9 mph, sending the ball out of Dodger Stadium. Meanwhile, he was still keeping the Brewers scoreless.
Then came home run No. 3.
Facing Brewers right-hander Trevor Megill, Ohtani ripped a ball 113.6 mph to the opposite field to put his team up 5-0.
Meanwhile, on the mound, Ohtani just kept stomping on the Brewers.
He finished with 10 strikeouts, three walks, two hits allowed and zero runs against one of MLB’s peskiest lineups. He featured a seven-pitch mix, according to Baseball Savant, and topped out on that 100.3-mph fastball to Chourio. Even by itself, that’s a star-level performance.
Here’s some perspective. In Game 3, Tyler Glasnow struck out eight, allowing three hits and only one run in 5 2/3 innings. It was, by a wide margin, the worst performance by a Dodgers starting pitcher in this series, behind Blake Snell’s eight innings of one-hit ball, Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s complete game and Ohtani’s two-way domination.
Ohtani’s night on the mound ended anticlimactically, with a walk and a single allowed to lead off the seventh inning, but he exited to a standing ovation, and then Dodgers left-hander Alex Vesia kept the Brewers scoreless. And one half-inning later, Ohtani hit his third homer.
In total, Ohtani hit the three hardest balls of the night, hit the three farthest balls of the night, threw the 11 hardest pitches of the night and led all pitchers in swing-and-misses. No other player in the history of baseball is capable of doing all that in a single game, and we might not ever see one do it again.
Ohtani wasn’t having the best postseason going into Game 4, but that didn’t stop the Brewers from treating him like a Barry Bonds-level threat throughout the NLCS. They threw left-handers at him at every opportunity, trying to prevent him from getting hot.
There was a reason for that, as we all saw on Friday.
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