If you needed any more proof that Shohei Ohtani has a place reserved among baseball's all-time greats, the two-way superstar offered up some pretty compelling evidence with his performance on Friday night.
Baseball is a sport in which it's difficult for one player to individually carry a team to victory on any given night. But what Ohtani did in Game 4 against the Milwaukee Brewers was as close as you'll get to one man single-handedly taking down the opposition on the diamond.
In what may go down as the greatest individual showing in MLB post-season history, Ohtani willed the Los Angeles Dodgers to their second straight World Series by dominating both on the mound and at the plate.
Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings on the night in just his second career MLB playoff start, using a devastating seven-pitch mix to strike out 10 Brewers while allowing just two hits.
Of course, he went supernova at the dish as well. Ohtani went 3-for-3 with three homers and a walk on the night, taking a new Brewers arm over the walls at Chavez Ravine for all three blasts.
Despite struggling through the first three games of the series, the one-of-a-kind outing earned Ohtani NLCS MVP honours.
The signs that something great might be brewing showed up in the first inning, when Ohtani walked Brewers leadoff man Brice Turang before needing just 13 pitches to strike out the next three batters in order.
He then calmly strode to the Dodgers' dugout, grabbed his bat and helmet, walked to the plate and hit a 3-2 slurve 446 feet to right field for his first of his three home runs on the night.
Preposterous, really.
With the Dodgers spraying champagne and celebrating another NL pennant, here is a look at some of the eye-popping numbers from what Freddie Freeman aptly dubbed "The Shohei Ohtani Game."
1: Ohtani set a number of firsts in the Dodgers' clincher, but how about Ohtani becoming the first pitcher in regular- or post-season history to hit a leadoff home run? A stat truly demonstrative of Ohtani's unicorn status in the game, not many pitchers in the history of the game have even been tabbed to take their team's first plate appearance of the game.
6-for-38: Perhaps it was just a matter of time, but Ohtani's playoff numbers hadn't been pretty so far in 2025. The three-time MVP had collected just six hits through Game 3 of the NLCS and just three since the start of Los Angeles' NLDS win over the Philadelphia Phillies. He also entered Game 4 tied with the Mariners' Julio Rodríguez for the post-season lead with 17 strikeouts and hadn't quite found his footing after hitting a leadoff shot in the wild-card round.
12: Before Ohtani's power Sho on Friday, only 11 players had hit three home runs in a post-season contest. Well, now the 31-year-old can call himself the 12th and the third Dodger to achieve the feat. In fact, L.A. batters now own the last three, as Chris Taylor left the yard thrice in the 2021 NLCS and Kiké Hernández did so in 2017.
19: The number of whiffs Ohtani earned on the night. His fastball did much of the heavy lifting, as he ramped the offering up over 100 m.p.h. on multiple occasions, but Ohtani got the Brewers to swing and miss at six of his seven different pitch types on the night. That includes his splitter returning a 100 per cent whiff rate on five swings.
27: While the home run binge will do a lot of the heavy lifting for the legacy of Ohtani's performance, what he did on the mound was almost more impressive. Facing one of the toughest lineups to strike out in baseball, the six-foot-three right-hander became just the 27th pitcher in MLB playoff history to record 10 or more strikeouts in a single game while allowing two or fewer hits and no runs.
116: Ohtani blasted two balls over the fence that clocked in north of 116 m.p.h. — his first- and fourth-inning shots. He is the first player to hit two homers in one game that came off the bat at 116 or higher.
1,342: The combined distance of Ohtani's three homers — the longest of which (469 feet) left Dodger Stadium entirely and is projected as the fifth furthest post-season big fly in the Statcast Era.
1978: The last and only time a leadoff hitter hit three dingers in one game came in the 1978 ALCS, when George Brett tormented Yankees pitchers while with the Kansas City Royals. Brett surely wishes he could have taken the mound, as well, since the Royals lost that game 6-5.
2018: MLB adding the designated hitter universally has essentially eliminated pitcher home runs altogether — Ohtani being the exception, of course. But with Ohtani's years on the Angels never turning into a playoff appearance, and elbow surgery keeping him off the mound last October, we hadn't seen a pitcher go deep in the playoffs since 2018. That was Brandon Woodruff, who homered off Dodgers lefty Clayton Kershaw in Game 1 of that year's NLCS between Los Angeles and Milwaukee.
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