Shohei Ohtani, who is the greatest baseball player ever, has had the greatest regular-season game ever and the greatest postseason game ever and looks capable of having the greatest World Series game ever.
Sentences are fun, aren’t they? You can pack so much into a single one of them.
Just like, as Ohtani shows us on the regular, you can pack so much into a single player.
You are free to quibble with that part of the sentence. Maybe Shawn Green’s four-homer game for the Dodgers in 2002 or A’s rookie Nick Kurtz’s four-homer game just this year (both Green and Kurtz hold the single-game record with 19 total bases) was the best regular-season game ever. If pitching is your thing, maybe Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game or Sandy Koufax or Matt Cain’s 14-strikeout perfect game or, heck, Armando Galarraga’s (technical) 28-out perfect game is the greatest regular-season game ever. Or maybe one of the myriad other Ohtani games in which he both hit and pitched at an elite level should enter the argument.
I think the context of christening the 50-50 Club and clinching a playoff spot for the Dodgers made the Miami game the greatest regular-season game ever.
But to each his or her own.
Greatest postseason game ever? It’s harder to argue against Ohtani here, after what we witnessed in the Dodgers’ 5-1 win that completed a sweep of the Brewers in the NLCS on Friday night.
That’s tough to top. Don Larsen went 0-for-2. Reggie Jackson didn’t strike anybody out, to my knowledge. Ohtani has such an abnormal baseline that it’s tough to come up with comparables.
And that brings us to another part of the sentence.
It feels appropriate to just throw in the “greatest baseball player ever” part in an embedded clause, given the way Ohtani’s unique annihilation of all that was once normal has become just another fun feature embedded into our game.
But every now and then you’ve got to splash some cold water on your face and remember that what you are watching has never been done at this sustained level of excellence before.
You’ll note that in the Ohtani era, we’ve had quite a few instances of teams drafting and attempting to develop the next two-way All-Star. Wake me up when one of them actually gets to the big leagues with both bat and ball in hand.
For now, there is only one Ohtani. When he’s done, the likes of Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron will have better batting stats. The likes of Walter Johnson and Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux and Cy Young will have better pitching stats. But there will never have been a peak of performance and treasure trove of talent quite like what we’ve seen from this single human being.*
*Assuming he really is one.
If there is one place left to quibble with Ohtani’s legacy (because it sure seems like our society always has to find something to quibble with), it’s that he hasn’t done much of major consequence on the World Series stage … yet.
This is not entirely Ohtani’s fault, mind you. In his lone World Series last year, he hit a double to set up a key run in Game 1 against the Yankees, and maybe that would have been the start of a special Series had he not dislocated his left shoulder* trying to steal second base in Game 2.
*If you can tear an elbow ligament and dislocate a shoulder, there’s a decent chance you are human. But I remain appropriately skeptical.
As it stands, Ohtani is batting .105 (2-for-19) with zero innings pitched in his World Series life.
But now we’re entering a 2025 World Series in which Ohtani is healthy, newly heated at the plate and able to fulfill his two-way role.
This allows us to dream big.
So let’s consider that last part of the sentence. Here are just a few ways Ohtani could rewrite the World Series record books in the coming Fall Classic.
We’ll list them in order from most likely to occur to least likely.
1. The best offensive performance by a pitcher
This seems like a low bar for Ohtani to cross. Assuming he gets a start in this World Series, these are some of the performances he’d be up against:
All it would really take for Ohtani to arguably achieve this one is, say, a two-homer game, regardless of how he fares on the mound. Piece of cake for him.
2. The best combined pitching/hitting performance in a World Series game
I’ll submit two current entries for this honor:
In Game 3 against the Yankees in 1926, the Cardinals’ Jesse Haines homered, singled and drove in two runs while throwing a complete-game shutout in a 4-0 win at Sportsman’s Park.
That’s a pretty nice day at the office.
If you’re looking for a more modern performance, then it’s Hershiser in that ’88 game against the A’s at Dodger Stadium — a complete-game shutout with eight strikeouts while also contributing three hits, including a pair of doubles.
For the sake of perspective, this is how Baseball Reference measures the win probability added (WPA) for Ohtani’s Game 4 in the NLCS vs. the two World Series games I’ve cited here:
Using this metric, Haines’ performance is ahead of what we just saw from Ohtani, though I do think it’s fair to say that the pressure and overall quality of the competition was a little different in 1926 than it is today. Ohtani’s was just the fifth three-homer game in a pennant- or World Series-clinching game, to go with the six brilliant innings, so … yeah. It was better. Sorry, Jesse.
Can Ohtani hurdle Haines on the World Series stage? Go ahead and tell him he can’t.
3. A relief outing combined with a clutch hit
This seems weirdly … realistic?
The Dodgers are light on relief help right now, and when you get deeper into a Series (and the postseason, in general), anything can happen with regard to pitchers taking on non-traditional roles.
Prior to the playoffs, the Dodgers pondered the possibility of Ohtani being more valuable to them in the bullpen than their deep rotation before ultimately going the route that makes the most sense for his routine and keeping him as a starter.
But again, it’s not hard to envision a scenario in which he abandons the DH spot in the late innings to pitch an inning of relief.*
*Should the Dodgers then have another defensive inning ahead of them, Ohtani would have to move to the outfield in order to stay in the game — something he has indicated he is open to.
Imagine Ohtani putting the Dodgers ahead in the top of the ninth on the road with a homer or run-scoring hit, and then taking the ball and striking out the side with that revived splitter.
Or Ohtani, having already notched a couple hits as a DH, taking the mound to preserve a tie in the top of the ninth and then delivering the walk-off winner in the bottom of the inning.
If you had proposed a player producing such a scenario a decade ago, you would have been accused of taking hallucinogens. Now, we can just shrug and say, “Yeah, I can see it.”
This option is available to anyone with a bat in hand in the World Series, Ohtani included.
If ever there was a year for a four-homer game in the World Series, it is apparently this one, because 2025 was the first season with three four-homer games.
There has never been a four-homer game in the postseason (Ohtani’s performance Friday was the 13th three-homer postseason game). In fact, four-homer games (21) are rarer than perfect games (24). So if Ohtani were to do this, it would instantly vault him into the conversation for greatest World Series performance ever.
And he wouldn’t have to throw a single pitch!
5. A no-hitter or perfect game with pretty much any contributions at the plate
Ohtani only has one complete game in his career, and he hasn’t pitched more than six innings in any of his starts in his return from Tommy John surgery this year. So this seems pretty darn doubtful.
That said, two of those six-inning starts were his two starts in this postseason, and the Dodgers’ bullpen circle of trust is not exactly wide right now. So if Ohtani is rolling along and chasing history, maybe Dave Roberts will let him eat.
Should it somehow come to that, this is how pitchers fared at the plate in the previous postseason no-hitters:
Again, a pretty low bar for Ohtani offensively … provided he can just do that whole no-hitter thing.
And hey, why not? He is the greatest player ever, after all. It says so right in that first sentence.
