LOS ANGELES — Mookie Betts stood on the Dodger Stadium field Friday night, a commemorative World Series cap on his head and a wide smile on his face, and made what felt like an apt comparison moments after the Los Angeles Dodgers completed a National League Championship Series sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers.
“It’s like we’re the Chicago Bulls,” Betts said, “and he’s Michael Jordan.”
Betts was referring, of course, to Shohei Ohtani, who had once again put together a performance many of his peers described as the greatest in baseball history. On the mound, he pitched six scoreless innings and struck out 10. in the batter’s box, he clobbered three home runs, one of which might have left the ballpark. And when it was over, and the Dodgers clinched a second straight pennant on an Ohtani-fueled 5-1 victory in Game 4 of the NLCS, his teammates once again struggled to make sense of it.
“Some human, huh?” Dodgers utility man Enrique Hernandez said of Ohtani, the NLCS MVP, despite being almost nonexistent for the first three games.
“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?'” third baseman max muncy said. “I can’t wait to pull up this game today. That’s the single best performance in the history of baseball. I don’t care what anyone says. obviously, I don’t know what happened a hundred years ago, but that’s the single best performance I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Ohtani entered Game 4 with just three hits and 14 strikeouts in 29 at-bats over his previous seven games, a slump so pronounced and so prolonged it prompted a very rare session of outdoor batting practice. Questions swirled about whether attempting to be a two-way player in the postseason was affecting his hitting, a thought at least partly backed by his struggles at the plate when he started on the mound during the regular season.
Ultimately, though, it was doing both that set him free.
“No one puts more pressure on himself than Shohei,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. Focusing on pitching, Dodgers hitting coach Aaron Bates believes, “actually took his mind off the hitting a little bit.”
“It let him go be an athlete in the box,” Bates said. “It let him just play baseball.”
Ohtani became the first player in major league history to hit two home runs as a pitcher in a postseason game, let alone three, according to ESPN research. He hit more home runs than he allowed hits (two),also a first. Before him, no pitcher — at any stage in the season — had hit a leadoff home run, and no player had accumulated three home runs as a hitter and 10 strikeouts as a pitcher. Ohtani is the first player in Dodgers history to homer as a pitcher in the postseason and the second to have a three-homer performance in an LCS-clinching game, joining Hernandez’s performance from 2017.
“I played left field that time,” Hernandez said,”and I didn’t get to punch all those people that he punched out.”
The Dodgers responded to their 2024 championship, their first in a full season in 36 years, by doubling down on a star-laden roster, coming away with another notable group in free agency. They entered the ensuing season with expectations of challenging Major League baseball’s regular-season-wins record.A 23-10 start only strengthened that belief.
But the Dodgers won just two more times than they lost over their next 110 games. For much of the season, they were bas