LOS ANGELES — It’s easy to take Shohei Ohtani for granted. By now, we’ve settled into the rote comfort: He is the best player on the planet, and that’s that. Ohtani’s baseline is everyone else’s peak. He is judged against himself and himself only.
And it’s human nature that when we watch something often enough — even something as mind-bending as a player who’s a full-time starting pitcher and full-time hitter and among the very best at both — it starts to register as normal.
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Which is why his performances on Friday — the unleashing of the full extent of Ohtani’s magic — was the sort of necessary reminder that one of the greatest athletes in the world, and the most talented baseball player ever, is playing right now, doing unfathomable things, redefining the game in real time. And that even when he starts the day mired in an uncharacteristic slump, Ohtani needs only a single game to launch himself into the annals of history.
Where Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series ranks on the all-time list of games will be debated for years. In the celebration following Los Angeles’ 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers, though, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts stood on the field and said, “That’s the greatest night in baseball history,” and no one cared to argue.
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Over the course of 2 hours, 41 minutes, in front of 52,883 fans, with millions watching domestically and tens of millions more in Japan, Ohtani threw six shutout innings and struck out 10 in between hitting three home runs that traveled a combined 1,342 feet, including one that left Dodger Stadium entirely. It was the sort of game that happens in comic books, not real life — and it was a game that completed a championship series sweep and sent Los Angeles to its second consecutive World Series. It was the kind of night that leaves patrons elated they saw it and also just a little ruined because they know they’ll never see anything like it again. Everyone was a prisoner, captive to perhaps the greatest individual game in the quarter-million or so played over the last century and a half.
It was, at very least, one of the finest displays of baseball since the game’s inception, up there with Tony Cloninger hitting two grand slams and throwing a complete game in 1966 or Rick Wise socking two home runs amid his no-hitter on the mound in 1971. And unlike those, this came in the postseason, and in a game to clinch Los Angeles the opportunity to become the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back championships.
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It wasn’t quite Don Larsen throwing a perfect game — but Larsen went 0-for-2 in that game and needed a Mickey Mantle home run to account for his scoring. It wasn’t Reggie Jackson hammering three home runs, either — because Reggie needed Mike Torrez to throw a complete game that night to make his blasts stand up.
Ohtani is the only player who can do this, the offense and the defense — the mastery of baseball, the distillation of talent into something pure and perfect.
Hours earlier, his day had started by navigating the tricky balance of starting and hitting on the same day. His metronomic routine, such a vital piece of his three MVP seasons (the fourth will be made official in mid-November), is upended completely when he pitches. He budgets for the extra time he needs to spend caring for his arm by sacrificing his attendance at the hitters’ meeting, instead getting the intel he needs from coaches in the batting cage about an hour before the game.
Nobody could tell, when Ohtani arrived in the underground cage Friday, that he was mired in a nasty slump that had stretched from the division series through the third game of the NLCS, a jag of strikeouts and soft contact and poor swing decisions and utter frustration that got so bad earlier in the week he had taken batting practice outside at Dodger Stadium, something he never — like, really, never — does. He had decided to do so on the plane ride back from Milwaukee, where the Dodgers had humbled the Brewers with the sort of starting pitching never seen in a league championship series.
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Game 4, his teammates were convinced, was going to be a culmination of that extra cage work and the matching of his pitching peers’ dominance.
“You guys asked me yesterday, and I said I was expecting nothing short of incredible today,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “And he proved me wrong. He went beyond incredible.”
After walking the leadoff hitter, Brice Turang, Ohtani struck out the next three hitters, popping a pair of 100 mph-plus fastballs and unleashing the most confounding version of his splitter seen all year. He followed by obliterating a slurve from Jose Quintana in the bottom of the inning for a home run, the first time a pitcher ever hit a leadoff homer in the game’s history, regular season or playoffs.
The strikeouts continued — one in the third inning, two more in the fourth, preceding Ohtani’s second home run, which left 50,000 mouths agape. In the stands, they cheered, and in the dugout, they whooped, and in the bullpen, they screamed: “The ball went out of the stadium!” Alex Vesia, the reliever who would come in after Ohtani struck out two more in the fifth and sixth innings, could not conceive that a person could hit a baseball in a game that far. Officially, it went 469 feet. It felt like 1,000.
“At that point, it’s got to be the greatest game ever, right?” said Vesia, who did his part to help keep it so. Ohtani allowed a walk and a hit in the seventh inning, and had Vesia allowed either run to score, the sparkling zero in his pitching line could’ve been an unsightly one or crooked two. When he induced a ground ball up the middle that nutmegged his legs, Mookie Betts was in perfect position to hoover it, step on second and fire to first for a double play that preserved Ohtani’s goose egg.
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In the next inning, Ohtani’s third home run of the night, and this one was just showing off: a shot to dead center off a 99 mph Trevor Megill fastball, a proper 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 off three different pitchers for home runs in one night, it is. To do so throwing six innings, allowing two hits, walking three and striking out 10 is otherworldly.
“We were so focused on just winning the game, doing what needed to be done, I’m not sure we realized how good it really was,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “I didn’t really appreciate it until after. Like, he actually did that?”
Yes. Yes he did. In baseball history, 503 players have hit three home runs in a game, and 1,550 have struck out 10 or more in a game. 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, set a truly impossible standard to match, and now, finally, having signed with a franchise capable of giving his talents the largest stage, Ohtani gets to perform when it matters most.
Milwaukee won more games during the regular season than anyone. Regardless of how impotent the Brewers’ offense was this series, they were a very good team, and the Dodgers flayed them. The final game was an exclamation point — and a warning for the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays, whichever survives the back-and-forth American League Championship Series.
Shohei Ohtani awaits. Good luck.
