No matter one’s interest level in baseball, from those actually playing the sport to the diehards and casual fans, those fortunate enough to have taken in Shohei Ohtani’s legendary performance in Friday’s NLCS Game 4 will have a memory to share for the rest of their life.
“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?’” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said after the series-clinching 5-1 home win over the Brewers, according to ESPN.
“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 submitted his application for the single-greatest game in MLB history with his two-way dominance that lifted the Dodgers to their second straight World Series appearance.
The dual slugger/ace hit three solo homers in a 3-for-3 night and complemented that showing by striking out 10 Brewers over six shutout innings while only allowing two hits.
“We were part of tonight an iconic, maybe the best individual performance ever in a postseason game,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said after his top-seeded team’s ouster. “I don’t think anybody can argue with that. Guy punches out 10 and hits three homers.”
The argument for Ohtani as the best player in baseball history centers around his ability to do what he did Friday, when he took over the game in both phases.
Baseball is a sport centered on run prevention and run creation, and Ohtani is the only current player who can do both — and he’s both an MVP hitter and a Cy Young-level pitcher.
He started his night striking out the Brewers in order and then hit the first of his three homers, a majestic 446-foot leadoff bomb off southpaw Jose Quintana.
The Dodgers grabbed a 3-0 lead that inning and, as the saying goes, Ohtani helped his own cause when he launched a second out of Dodger Stadium in the fourth inning to boost the lead to 4-0.
Three innings later, he capped his masterpiece with a 427-hoot homer off Trevor Megill.
While he dominated the Brewers’ pitching, he prevented Milwaukee from getting off the mat in what proved to be a one-sided sweep.
Ohtani’s iconic game earned him NLCS MVP honors.
“That was probably the greatest postseason performance of all time. There’s been a lot of postseason games. And there’s a reason why he’s the greatest player on the planet,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “What he did on the mound, what he did at the bat, he created a lot of memories for a lot of people. So for us to have a game-clinching — to do it in a game-clinching game at home, wins the NLCS MVP, pretty special. I’m just happy to be able to go along for the ride.”
While others gave Ohtani’s showing the label of the GOAT performance, the Japanese superstar did not want to heap that level of praise on himself.
He and the Dodgers will now look to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions since the three-peating Yankees from 1998-2000 when they meet the winner of the Mariners-Blue Jays series.
“As I stated before, there were at times during the postseason where Teo [Hernandez] and Mookie [Betts] picked me up. And this time around it was my turn to be able to perform,” Ohtani said through a translator. “And I think just looking back over the course of the entire postseason, I haven’t performed to the expectation, but I think today we saw what the left-handed hitters could do.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
