Two days before perhaps the greatest game in baseball history, Shohei Ohtani took one of the best rounds of batting practice anyone in attendance had seen.
It started with a swing-and-a-miss, Ohtani goofing around after his walk-up song blared through the Dodger Stadium speakers and his teammates gathered in the dugout with anxious anticipation.
Then came some nondescript line drives, Ohtani getting into the real work of trying to fix a swing that had abandoned him for much of this postseason.
Finally, one ball went over the fence. Then another. Then another. In 32 swings, Ohtani hit 14 home runs. Many of them were moonshots. One even clanged off the roof of the right-field pavilion.
“He didn’t disappoint,” Max Muncy later recounted. “He hit a ball out of the stadium.”
On that off-day workout between Games 2 and 3 of the National League Championship Series, Ohtani looked like a man on a mission.
Over his previous seven games, going back to the start of the NL Division Series, he had two hits in 25 at-bats. He had recorded 12 strikeouts and plenty more puzzling swing decisions. And he seemed, at least in the estimation of some around the team, unusually perturbed as public criticisms of his play started to mount.
There were questions about his out-of-sync swing mechanics. Second-guessing of his poor quality of at-bats. Mostly, speculation centered on whether the physical toll of his two-way duties was starting to impact his potentness at the plate.
“All those things,” manager Dave Roberts said, “I think were fuel to his fire.”
Thus, the soon-to-be four-time MVP decided it was time to change something up.
On the team’s flight home from Milwaukee the previous night, Ohtani informed the club’s hitting coaches he wanted to take batting practice on the field — a break from his normal routine that signaled his urgency to get back on track.
When he arrived at the ballpark, he joked about his slump with teammates and brushed it off in a pre-workout news conference.
What came next was his memorable BP session.
Then, two days later, a tour de force performance that will be talked about forever.
In a 5-1 defeat of the Milwaukee Brewers that completed an NLCS sweep and gave the Dodgers their 26th pennant in franchise history — plus a return trip to the World Series to defend last year’s championship — Ohtani put on a show of unbelievable proportions.
Three home runs as a hitter. Six-plus scoreless innings with 10 strikeouts as a pitcher. And one stadium-shaking, mind-bending, unprecedented moment after the next.
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“That was probably the greatest postseason performance of all time,” Roberts said.
“He pulled the ultimate unicorn move tonight,” teammate Kiké Hernández concurred.
In the first inning, Ohtani struck out three batters, then walked up to the plate and took José Quintana deep with a 446-foot blast deep into the right-field pavilion — becoming the first pitcher in MLB history (regular season or playoffs) to lead a game off with a home run.
In the fourth, he escaped his biggest threat by stranding a leadoff double with consecutive punchouts that had him fist-pumping off the mound, then returned to the dish and hit a ball straight out of the stadium — clearing the roof of the right-field pavilion with a titanic drive of 469 feet.
He finished his pitching outing with his only hint of frustration, exiting with no outs in the seventh after a leadoff walk and ground-ball single. But then, he turned a spectacular night into the unthinkable, becoming just the 12th player in postseason history with a three-homer game by lining an opposite-field shot to the left-field seats.
“He woke up this morning with people questioning him,” said Andrew Friedman, Dodgers president of baseball operations, during an alcohol-soaked celebration in the clubhouse afterward. “And 12 hours later, he’s standing on the podium as the NLCS MVP.”
It was the kind of game the baseball world dreamed about when the two-way phenom first arrived from Japan. It fulfilled the prophecy that has accompanied his near-mythical standing in a sport that had gone a century since its last two-way superstar.
“The limitations of the human brain, we can’t comprehend just how special this is and how unique,” Friedman added.
Ohtani’s take?
“This time around, it was my turn to be able to perform,” he said through interpreter Will Ireton. “I think just looking back over the course of the entire postseason, I haven’t performed to the expectation.”
Expectations, of course, are nothing new to Ohtani.
When he first arrived in the majors with a 100 mph fastball and a majestic swing from the left side of the plate, the comparisons to Babe Ruth were already underway.
At first, his transition to the majors came with some early growing pains, and the first of his two career Tommy John surgeries. But over the last five years, he has blossomed into the definitive face of the game.
All that had been missing, in a resume chock full of MVPs and All-Star selections and records so unattainable even the Great Bambino never reached them, was a signature performance as a two-way player in October. A game in which he dominated on the mound, thrilled at the plate, and single-handedly took control in a postseason environment.
That it came on Friday, amid one of the worst hitting slumps of his career, surprised no one with the Dodgers.
Friedman said he could sense something special, noting that “you can only contain Shohei for so long.”
His teammates were also awaiting a breakout, voiced by Muncy’s post-Game 3 prediction to “expect the incredible.”
By that point, the Dodgers had already seen Ohtani’s batting practice session. They had felt the dissatisfaction that was stirring within him.
“There was a lot of talk that he was scuffling at the plate, he doesn’t swing the bat well when he’s pitching,” Roberts said. “So, today when he took the mound, you could see the focus, the intent.”
“It’s kind of like an expectation for him,” Mookie Betts echoed. “For only him.”
Ohtani’s start on the mound — his first pitching performance since that NLDS opener that began his cold spell with the bat — began with shaky command and a leadoff walk to Brice Turang.
But then, the overpowering right-hander recorded three-straight strikeouts, two with 100-mph fastballs and a third with a swing-and-miss sweeper.
Shohei Ohtani pitches during Game 4 of the NLCS against the Brewers. Ohtani struck out 10 over six scoreless innings for the Dodgers. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
When his first home run followed barely five minutes later, “it was kind of like, ‘All right, it’s gonna be that kind of night,’” Muncy recalled thinking. “Let’s have fun.”
The most fun was had on Ohtani’s next home run in the fourth inning, when he hit one even farther than his off-day BP bomb.
The moment he connected on the swing, drilling an inside cutter from Brewers reliever Chad Patrick, mouths dropped in the Dodgers dugout. As the ball kept sailing, players put their hands to their face with looks of disbelief.
“That ball is no less than 500 feet,” Muncy proclaimed. “It didn’t land on the roof. It went over the roof.”
Added Betts, who got an up-close view from on-deck: “I think that took everybody’s breath away.”
In the Dodgers’ executive suite, Friedman’s amazement was summed up in a Slack message he sent in a chat to the rest of the front office.
“This is the greatest four innings ever played in postseason history,” it read.
From there, it would only keep getting better.
By the fourth inning, Ohtani went in full cruise control upon finding a feel for his splitter, which induced a whiff all five times the Brewers tried to swing at it. From the fourth to the sixth, he retired nine-straight batters, and six of them on strikeouts. A crowd of 52,883 roared with every pitch.
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“He got his split going, and he was able to do whatever he wanted,” pitching coach Mark Prior said. “It just opens up everything else.”
After Ohtani left the mound — and got an assist from left-handed reliever Alex Vesia, who stranded both of the runners he left behind — he returned to the plate one last time in the seventh and lasered a third home run that by that point was almost expected.
“No one even questioned it,” Muncy joked.
“Just so that people don’t say he only pulls homers, he went oppo really far too,” Hernández also deadpanned.
Dodgers president Stan Kasten watched that one from his office, reacting in private with “something completely unprintable.”
Friedman, meanwhile, went back to his Slack channel.
“There’s no question it was the greatest postseason performance ever,” he said.
By night’s end, Ohtani had been named MVP of the series — busting out of his slump and straight into October history.
Dodgers players and coaches celebrate after sweeping the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS at Dodger Stadium on Friday night. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
And now, the already unstoppable Dodgers will enter the World Series with an aura of invincibility. They have a star-studded rotation, which set a league championship series record with a 0.63 ERA. A 9-1 record this postseason, which now includes the first NLCS sweep in club history. And, at long last, the confidence of seeing Ohtani dominate in a way that only he can.
“I can’t wait for when I’m a little bit older and my kids are asking about, ‘What’s the greatest thing you’ve ever seen in baseball?’” Muncy said. “I can’t wait to pull up this game today.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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