Shohei Ohtani was about to complete his walk from the mound to his team’s bench in the middle of the fifth inning on Tuesday night when he realized he forgot something.
Ohtani quickly pivoted and ran toward the on-deck circle at Uniqlo Field, where a bat boy was waiting for him with his hitting gear.
In this game, at that moment, Ohtani was a pitcher first and a hitter second.
Years ago, when Ohtani was still playing for the Nippon-Ham Fighters of the Japanese league, his high school coach told me that when he saw him hitting, he saw a boy playing a game for enjoyment. The same coach, Hiroshi Sasaki of Hanamaki Higashi High, said he saw something different in Ohtani when he pitched.
The reason: Ohtani thought of pitching as his true job.
Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy has reached a similar conclusion after playing alongside Ohtani for the last couple of seasons.
“I know everyone always talks about his hitting,” Muncy said, “but getting to know him over the years, he really loves pitching. He loves everything about it. I think pitching is what he’s really all about.”
And this could be the 31-year-old Ohtani’s best, and perhaps last, chance to show what he’s capable of doing on the mound.
Which is why if he doesn’t win the National League’s Cy Young Award, he’s going to come close.
Ohtani has won a Most Valuable Player Award in a season in which he didn’t throw a single pitch. He has never come close to that level of dominance as a pitcher. The highest he’s ever finished in Cy Young voting was fourth.
He said before the season that it would be “wonderful” if he could win a Cy Young, and he started his award campaign by pitching six scoreless innings in a 4–1 victory over the Cleveland Guardians.
Afterwards, he spoke about wanting to surpass the benchmarks he established in 2022, when he was 15–9 with a 2.33 earned-run average with the Angels. He pitched a career-high 166 innings that season.
“I think of that as my best season,” Ohtani said in Japanese.
As well as he pitched that year, he didn’t start that season as well as he did this one. He certainly didn’t have as well-rounded an arsenal.
Against the Guardians, Ohtani used his fastball to set up his curveball and splitter against their left-handed hitters, whereas his sweeper and sinker were his primary weapons against their right-handed hitters.
Ohtani touched 99.2 mph with his fastball but implied there was more in his surgically repaired arm.
“Whether I threw lightly or whether I threw harder, it didn’t make much of a difference today,” he said. “In that case, it’s better to throw lightly, when you consider the overall physical burden.”
And presumably his ability to locate his pitches as well.
Control was sacrificed to a degree last year. Ohtani was aware of the data that showed that pitchers in their first season back from Tommy John surgery often have problems with control. He figured that if he couldn’t place the ball exactly where he wanted, he might as well throw harder. So he adjusted his delivery to generate more velocity on his pitches.
With his six-pitch mix, Ohtani limited the Guardians to a hit and three walks. He struck out six in a game in which his footing on the mound was made unstable by a constant drizzle.
“He’s just unflappable,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “Not a whole lot affects his mind.”
And when he sets his mind on something, he often finds a way to do it.
In his first season with the Dodgers, for example, Ohtani wasn’t able to pitch because he was recovering from a major elbow operation. He made it a point to steal more bases that year, and the result was the first 50-homer, 50-steal season in major league history.
Ohtani now has to know that he might not have many more chances to leave his mark on the game as a pitcher. He’s already undergone two Tommy John surgeries. If he blows out his elbow again, he will likely be past his physical prime by the time he returns to the mound — and that’s assuming he could be one of the small handful of pitchers to come back from a third elbow reconstruction.
He knows the opportunity he has in front of him. Injuries have limited him as a pitcher to three 100-inning seasons. This could be his fourth. He’s at the height of his physical powers and technical mastery. He doesn’t look or sound as if he’s about to blow this.
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