The fan reaction to Shohei Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series clincher on Friday went from “Oh, man,” to “Oh, wow!” to “Oh, baby!!”
There are not enough superlatives to describe what the Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher/designated hitter did to the Milwaukee Brewers in the 5-1 victory at Dodgers Stadium that finished off an impressive L.A. sweep.
Ohtani performed more like a comic book character in this game. Like some otherworldly being conjured up by a creative genius to make the impossible come true, he showed how one man can do things that make observers stop and ask whether he is indeed human.
The two-way history maker hit a ball out of the stadium for his second solo blast and took a 1–2 pitch the opposite way to left-center field for his third longball of the game. Meanwhile, he pitched with the fury of being relegated to No. 4 starter in the postseason rotation, firing a number of 100-plus mph fastballs right past Brewers hitters.
Sure, 11 position players had previously smashed three home runs in a playoff game (Ohtani’s was the 13th postseason homer hat trick), and just accomplishing that kind of feat alone in an elimination game would have placed Ohtani near the top of the list of Dodgers’ legends in the annals of this historic franchise.
Ohtani, though, also threw six-plus shutout innings—with double digits in strikeouts—to silence a team that was fighting for its playoff life.
“He’s the best,” Bobby Valentine, a former big league manager and Japan Series-winning skipper of the Chiba Lotte Marines said in an email to The Epoch Times.
At the postgame press conference, when the Japanese media asked Ohtani about his clinical performance that ousted the Brewers, he responded in a humble way.
“I still haven’t had time to reflect on today’s game. I did hit three homers, but I’m looking at both sides and really focusing on the run-prevention side and my performance on the mound. Going forward, I’d like to find the positives and negatives. But overall, I might’ve outdone myself.”
He would not say definitively that this was the best performance of his career.
“If you look at the big picture, I think you could probably say that [it was my best game], but I left with two runners on base without getting an out in the seventh inning. Now, the relievers did well to hold them down and that helped me and was a big part of how the game played out, but if I could have shut them down there and gotten out of [the inning] I think it would have been a perfect outing.”
And keep this in mind, before turning professional in Japan, Ohtani played as a position player. So the United States hasn’t really seen all he can be on the field.
In fact, his first pro team, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters of Japan’s Pacific League, early on in Ohtani’s first spring training had the star player tuck his right arm behind his body to protect it as he fielded grounders.
So he has literally played with one arm behind his back.
He was voted the MVP of the NLCS, but it might be the fact the bat of the Dodgers slugger, who has 109 regular-season homers in two years with L.A., had been pretty much silent against Milwaukee and this was likely his only chance to pitch during the series.
Manager Dave Roberts might have sparked a fire in his legendary player by holding him back in the NLCS after Ohtani started on the mound in Game 1 of the NL Division Series.
“Things just happened to line up tonight and I had a game like this in a situation such as this and I received the MVP,” Ohtani said. “But the previous three games were biggest part of getting to this point, where we were one game away. And it’s great that we were able to win the clincher, but in those three games, everyone did very good work—and in all four of these games as well.”
The all-time performance won’t mean much, though, if the Dodgers don’t finish this postseason run off with their second consecutive World Series championship.
They have a week before they take on the American League CS winner in the Fall Classic, and the rest-or-rust narrative figures to take center stage. If Ohtani stays in a groove, it’ll be long forgotten when the Series is over.
“I felt good, including batting practice and [Thursday’s] game results, and again tonight in the game, when I went up to bat, I felt like I was going to be able to hit,” Ohtani said. “But what’s difficult and what it’s all about will be about trying to keep it going.”
Friends Read Free
Copy
Facebook
Tweet
