Shohei Ohtani and the most dominant playoff game in MLB history
A 469-foot hit and a series-clinching gem on the same night? In the fourth NLCS game, we got the full Ohtani experience in October.
LOS ANGELES — It’s easy to take Shohei Ohtani’s greatness for granted. By now, we’ve gotten used to the routine: he’s the best player on the planet, period. Ohtani’s starting point is the high point of all the others. He is judged only by himself.
And it’s only natural that when we see something often enough, even something as mind-blowing as a player who is a full-time starting pitcher and hitter, and one of the best in both disciplines, it starts to feel normal.
That’s why his performances on Friday – the display of all of Ohtani’s magic – were the necessary reminder that one of the best athletes in the world, and the most talented baseball player in history, is playing right now, doing unimaginable things, redefining baseball in real time. And that even when he begins the day mired in an unusual slump, Ohtani only needs one game to go down in history.
The place of Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series on the all-time list will be debated for years. However, in the celebration after Los Angeles’ 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts came out on the field and said, “That’s the greatest night in baseball history,” and no one wanted to argue.
Over the course of 2 hours and 41 minutes, in front of 52,883 fans, with millions watching in the United States and tens of millions more in Japan, Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings and struck out 10, while also hitting three home runs that traveled a total of 1,342 feet, including one that left Dodger Stadium entirely. It was the kind of game that happens in comics, not real life, and it was a game that completed a championship series sweep and sent Los Angeles to its second straight World Series. It was the kind of night that leaves viewers elated to have seen it and also a little broke because they know they will never see anything like it again. They were all prisoners, captives of perhaps the greatest single game in the quarter-million played over the last century and a half.
It was, at the very least, one of baseball’s best displays since its inception, right up there with Tony Cloninger hitting two grand slams and pitching a complete game in 1966 or Rick Wise hitting two home runs in the middle of his no-hitter on the mound in 1971. And unlike those, this happened in the postseason, and in a game that assured Los Angeles the chance to become the first team in a quarter century to win consecutive championships.
It wasn’t exactly Don Larsen pitching a perfect game, but Larsen went 0-for-2 in that game and needed a Mickey Mantle home run to score. It wasn’t Reggie Jackson hitting three home runs either, because Reggie needed Mike Torrez to pitch a complete game that night for his hits to stand out.
Ohtani is the only player who can accomplish this, offense and defense: baseball mastery, the distillation of talent into something pure and perfect.
Hours earlier, his day had begun grappling with the difficult balance between opening and batting on the same day. His metronomic routine, a key piece of his three seasons as Most Valuable Player (the fourth will be made official in mid-November), is completely altered when he pitches. He saves extra time to take care of his arm by sacrificing his attendance at the batters’ huddle, and instead receives the necessary information from the coaches in the batting cage about an hour before the game.
No one could have imagined, when Ohtani arrived at the underground cage on Friday, that he was mired in a slump that had stretched from the division series to Game 3 of the National League Championship Series: a streak of strikeouts, soft contact, poor swing decisions and utter frustration that got so bad earlier in the week that he had to take batting practice outside at Dodger Stadium, something he’d never done before. -seriously, never- does. He had decided to do it on the flight back from Milwaukee, where the Dodgers had humiliated the Brewers with starting pitching never seen before in a league championship series.
His teammates were convinced that the fourth game would be the culmination of that extra work in the cage and matching the dominance of his fellow pitchers.
“You guys asked me yesterday, and I told you I was expecting something incredible today,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “And he proved me wrong. It was beyond incredible.”
After walking leadoff hitter Brice Turang, Ohtani struck out the next three batters, hitting a pair of 100-plus mph fastballs and unleashing the most baffling version of his splitter seen all year. He then erased Jose Quintana’s breaking ball in the bottom of the inning for a home run, the first time a pitcher hit a leadoff home run in baseball history, whether in the regular season or playoffs.
The strikeouts continued: one in the third inning, two more in the fourth, before Ohtani’s second home run, which left 50,000 people speechless. In the stands they cheered, in the dugout they cheered, and in the bullpen they shouted: “The ball left the stadium!” Alex Vesia, the reliever who would come in after Ohtani struck out two more in the fifth and sixth innings, couldn’t conceive that anyone could hit a baseball that far in a game. Officially, the ball traveled 469 feet. It felt like there were 1,000 of them.
“At that point, it has to be the best game ever, right?” said Vesia, who did his part to make it that way. Ohtani allowed a walk and a hit in the seventh inning, and if Vesia had allowed either run, the bright zero on his pitch line could have been an ugly one or a crooked two. When he caused a grounder up the middle that tunneled through his legs, Mookie Betts was in the perfect position to catch it, step on second and fire to first for a double play that saved Ohtani’s immaculate performance.
In the next inning, Ohtani’s third home run of the night, and this was just a sample: a drive to center off a 99 mph Trevor Megill fastball, a perfect complement to the second off an 89 mph Chad Patrick cutter and the first off a 79 mph Quintana slurve. If it sounds impressive to hit three different pitches against three different pitchers for home runs in one night, it is. To accomplish that, pitching six innings, allowing two hits, walking three and striking out 10, is extraordinary.
“We were so focused on winning the game, doing what needed to be done, that I’m not sure we realized how good it was,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “I didn’t really appreciate it until later. Did it really?”
Yes. Yes he did. In the history of baseball, 503 players have hit three home runs in a game and 1,550 have struck out 10 or more. None, until Friday, had done both. And that’s what Shohei Ohtani does, who he is. For eight years, he has transformed what is possible in baseball, setting a standard truly impossible to match, and now, finally, after signing with a franchise capable of giving his talent the biggest stage, Ohtani can perform when it matters most.
Milwaukee won more games during the regular season than anyone else. Regardless of how weak the Brewers’ offense was in this series, they were a very good team, and the Dodgers destroyed them. The last game was an exclamation point, and a warning for the Seattle Mariners or the Toronto Blue Jays, whoever survives the American League Championship Series.
Shohei Ohtani waits. Good luck!
