Shohei Ohtani and the most dominant MLB playoff game ever

LOS ANGELES — It’s easy to take Shohei Ohtani for granted. Now we’re settled into the usual comfort: he’s the best player on the planet, and that’s it. Ohtani’s base is the top of all others. He is judged against himself and himself.

And it’s human nature that when we watch something often enough – even something as breathtaking as a player who is a starting pitcher and a full-time hitter and among the best at both – it starts to register as usual.

His performance Friday — unleashing the full extent of Ohtani’s magic — was the kind of necessary reminder that one of the world’s greatest athletes, and the most talented baseball player of all time, is playing right now, doing unfathomable things, redefining the game in real time. And even when he starts the day mired in an unusual slump, Ohtani only needs one match 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 will be debated for years. At the celebration following the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts stood on the field and declared, “This is the greatest night in the history of baseball,” and no one wanted to argue.

In 2 hours and 41 minutes, in front of 52,883 fans, with millions watching nationally and tens of millions more in Japan, Ohtani pitched six shutout innings and struck out 10 in between, hitting three home runs that traveled a total of 1,342 feet, including one that left Dodger Stadium entirely. It was the kind of play that happens in comic books, not in real life — and it was a play that completed a championship series and sent Los Angeles to its second consecutive World Series. It was the kind of night that leaves patrons thrilled to have seen it and also just a little spoiled because they know they’ll never see anything like it again. Everyone was a prisoner, captive to perhaps the greatest individual game of the quarter of a million played over the last century and a half.

It was, at the very least, one of the finest displays of baseball since the game’s inception, 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, it happened in the postseason and in a game that had Los Angeles becoming the No. 1 team in a quarter. century to win consecutively. championships.

It wasn’t quite Don Larsen pitching a perfect game — but Larsen went 0-for-2 in that game and needed a Mickey Mantle home run to account for his score. It wasn’t Reggie Jackson hammering three homers, either — because Reggie needed Mike Torrez to pitch a complete game that night for his outbursts to hold up.

Ohtani is the only player who can do that, on offense and defense – the mastery of baseball, the distillation of talent into something pure and perfect.

Hours earlier, his day had begun by finding the delicate balance between starting and hitting on the same day. His metronomic routine, an essential element of his three MVP seasons (the fourth will be made official in mid-November), is completely disrupted when he throws. He budgets for the extra time he needs to take care of his arm by sacrificing his presence at the hitters’ meeting, instead of getting the information he needs from the coaches in the batting cage about an hour before the game.

No one could tell, when Ohtani arrived in the underground cage on Friday, that he was mired in a bad patch that had stretched from the Division Series to Game 3 of the NLCS, a series of strikeouts and soft contact and bad swing decisions and utter frustration that got so bad earlier in the week that he had taken away batting practice at Dodger Stadium, something he never does – really, never –. He had decided to do it on the plane ride home from Milwaukee, where the Dodgers had humiliated the Brewers with the kind of starting pitching never before seen in a league championship series.

Game 4, his teammates were convinced, was going to be the culmination of that extra work in the cage and the domination of his pitching peers.

“You asked me yesterday, and I said I expected nothing less than incredible today,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “And he proved me wrong. He went beyond incredible.”

After walking leadoff hitter Brice Turang, Ohtani struck out the next three batters, throwing a pair of 100-plus mph fastballs and unleashing the most confusing version of his splitter seen all year. He then erased a late-inning home run by Jose Quintana for a home run, the first time a pitcher hit a leadoff home run in the history of the game, regular season or postseason.

The strikeouts continued – one in the third inning, two more in the fourth, preceding Ohtani’s second home run, which left 50,000 jaws agape. In the stands they applauded, and in the dugout they shouted, and in the bullpen they shouted: “The ball went out of the stadium!” Alex Vesia, the reliever who would step in after Ohtani struck out two more in the fifth and sixth innings, couldn’t fathom how anyone could hit a baseball in a game that far. Officially, he traveled 469 feet. It was like 1,000.

“At this point, this has to be the best game ever, right?” said Vesia, who did her part to keep it that way. 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 might have been unsightly or two crooked. When he induced a ground ball up the middle that strained his legs, Mookie Betts was in perfect position to suck it in, walk to second and yank to first for a double play that preserved Ohtani’s goose egg.

In the next inning came Ohtani’s third home run of the night, and this one was just showing: a dead center shot on a 99 mph Trevor Megill fastball, a fitting follow-up to the second on an 89 mph Chad Patrick cutter, and the first on a 79 mph Jose Quintana slurve). If it seems impressive to hit three different pitches to three different pitchers for home runs in one night, it is. To do that, pitching six innings, allowing two hits, walking three and striking out 10 is supernatural.

“We were so focused on winning the game, on what needed to be done, that I’m not sure we realized how good it really was,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “I didn’t really like it until afterward. Like, did he really do 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. Until Friday, none had done both. And that’s what Shohei Ohtani does, who he is. For eight years, he transformed what’s possible in baseball, set a standard truly impossible to match, and now, finally, after signing with a franchise capable of giving his talents the biggest stage, Ohtani can perform when it matters most.

Milwaukee has won more regular season games than anyone. No matter how helpless the Brewers offense was in this series, they were a very good team and the Dodgers flayed them. The final game was an exclamation point — and a warning to the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays, depending on who survives the back-and-forth American League Championship Series.

Shohei Ohtani waits. Good luck.