Was Shohei Ohtani’s NLCS Game 4 the greatest baseball performance ever? Who wins the World Series? A conversation
By Harry Enten, CNN
(CNN) — Baseball fans continue to marvel at Shohei Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series.
He hit three home runs and pitched six innings of shutout ball. This left a lot of people wondering and flat out saying it was the greatest postseason effort of all time.
But was it? I discussed that, Ohtani’s overall impact on baseball and the upcoming World Series with my old friend and sports expert Mr. Neil Paine. He runs his own substack.
Was that the best baseball performance ever?
Harry Enten (HE): I looked this up and Ohtani is the first pitcher ever to hit two, let alone three home runs in a postseason game. He is also only the 10th pitcher to go for at least six innings, giving up two hits, no runs and striking out at least 10. Is there anything I’m missing here?
Neil Paine (NP): It’s interesting. Technically, there were probably games in history where someone added more total value with either the bat or the pitching arm than Ohtani did combined last week. For instance, there’s a stat called Run Expectancy Added that tracks how much a batter improved his team’s chances of scoring (or a pitcher reduced the opponent’s chances) – and in that stat, Ohtani graded as a +5.16 between his batting (+3.13) and pitching (2.03). There were 10 playoff games by batters where someone added more value than Ohtani did overall, and 10 playoff games by pitchers where they could say the same.
And yet, there’s something about the “unicorn” nature of what Ohtani did that feels like it should get extra credit, beyond what the raw numbers say. None of those 10 batters were also pitching, or vice-versa, and to have one guy do both is almost completely unprecedented. Babe Ruth’s best combined Run Expectancy Added in a playoff game that he also pitched was just +4.01.
It’s almost one of those definitional things where, if this is Ohtani’s greatest combined batting/pitching game ever – and it was, by Run Expectancy – it must also be the best combined game by anybody because he’s the only guy who’s ever really even tried this kind of thing (at least among modern players).
HE: I love the advanced stats there because it does put it all together. You make a fairly convincing case that it wasn’t the “greatest”… but it makes me think we’re looking at the wrong words here.
The right word is historic. Ohtani literally made history. It is one of a kind –i.e. truly unique – even if it wasn’t the greatest.
NP: Or what I really like is what my fellow Substacker (and your fellow Ivy grad) Doug Glanville has called what Shohei tends to do: “Ohtanic.” It’s a special sort of thing that not only hasn’t been done before, but also up until about a decade ago, we didn’t even think was possible in the game anymore.
Is Ohtani the best ever?
HE: This I think is part of the Ohtani playbook overall. I saw people online making the statement that Ohtani is the greatest ever or best ever.
But anyone can look it up and see there have been people who have done better. There are people who have hit more home runs, for example. There have been people who have higher wins above replacement (or WAR, an advanced statistic that seeks to measure a player’s overall contribution).
But then you look at players who pitched at least 5% of the time. Only Ohtani and Ruth have hit 100 or more home runs. Ohtani has hit nearly 300 homers and has plenty of career left.
He is truly one of a kind for players in the last 90 years.
NP: Well, I wanna push back on one thing you said: “Anyone can look it up.” It’s actually surprisingly difficult to find the combined Run Expectancy stats I mentioned above, for instance. And only in the past few years did FanGraphs even add a combined WAR leaderboard, pretty much in response to Ohtani’s existence.
I think that really gets to the one-of-a-kind angle as much as anything else – when these statistical sites or historical resources were set up during the 21st century, it had been so long since there was a truly viable batter/pitcher hybrid like this that they didn’t even think they would need to mash together players’ stats across both activities. Ohtani broke how we do seemingly simple stat lookups with these feats that are so outside the bounds of what is usually considered “normal” for the purposes of reporting on the game.
Ohtani is dragging eyes from overseas to the US game
HE: That might be the gentlest pushback in history, ha ha. You know I read what you write here, and it really gets to how Ohtani breaks the traditional metrics. He’s forcing us to think about baseball differently.
You know I’ve written a number of pieces in the past about how baseball viewership is way down from its heights – even if they are up a little bit this year.
Ohtani makes those comparisons somewhat useless. Why? He’s bringing in so many international viewers. Specifically, those from Japan. More people in Japan tuned into this season’s Tokyo Series starring the (Los Angeles) Dodgers than Americans did to last year’s World Series.
Baseball nearly doubled its viewership of last year’s World Series thanks to Japan, even as those games were playing in the morning in Tokyo.
NP: The Dodgers have truly become Japan’s team in recent years, and Ohtani is unsurprisingly right in the middle of that. He gave them the most valuable Japanese hitter in the league by WAR, and the team also had the most valuable Japanese pitcher in Yoshinobu Yamamoto – plus two more positive-value pitchers in the form of Roki Sasaki and Ohtani himself.
Every time a great player gets posted from NPB (Japan’s version of MLB), the Dodgers are either the frontrunners to sign him or at least on the very short list of candidates, in part because of the talent pipeline they’ve already built in LA.
And then that builds a virtuous cycle where the Dodgers get a ton of attention from fans in Japan, and when they do well, it makes them a more appealing destination for the next generation of players coming over, and so forth.
We used to associate the (Seattle) Mariners and (New York) Yankees with acquiring Japanese stars as well – think of Ichiro (Suzuki) and Hideki Matsui, for instance – but the Dodgers were always the original destination going back to Hideo Nomo, and they’ve re-asserted themselves in that regard again, to the benefit of their brand and MLB’s as a whole.
HE: Again, this is a situation where Ohtani is just unique. Yes, those guys were big in Japan, but Ohtani is just different. Moreover, the way baseball has capitalized on him is different too.
Who wins the World Series?
HE: And thanks to that, we’re now onto a World Series that truly feels more “World” than ever before. We got the popularity of the game in Japan and the Toronto Blue Jays are involved.
Of course, there can only be one winner. The prediction markets have the Dodgers as more than a 2:1 favorite over the team whose flag flies north of the border. What do you say?
NP: I’m just old enough to remember when they made a big deal about the Blue Jays facing the Atlanta Braves in 1992 as the first true, international “World” Series. Look at how far we’ve come!
But yeah, the Dodgers are fairly heavy favorites, and it’s hard to argue against that after what they did to the Milwaukee Brewers – who had the best record in baseball during the regular season – in what was a very lopsided, brutal NLCS sweep.
The things that I think point to Toronto having a chance are that the Dodgers’ starters pitched out of their minds during that series: they had literally the best rotation ERA (0.63) ever in a League Championship Series. That may not be able to be repeated for a second straight series, though they are coming off a near-record amount of rest heading into the Fall Classic.
The Blue Jays are also much better offensively than Milwaukee – they’re averaging 6.5 RPG in the postseason with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. carrying a 1.440 OPS. And then, if you get to the Dodger bullpen, you’re facing a group that was outside the top 20 in WAR during the regular season.
But the thing that makes the Dodgers so dangerous is just how many players they have who can hurt you. If it’s not Ohtani – and it’s worth pointing out that, despite the mammoth Game 4 we talked about earlier, he was hitting below .200 in the NLCS beforehand, yet they were still dominating – it might be Freddie Freeman, or Mookie Betts, or a bunch of guys – like Tommy Edman, Teoscar Hernández, Max Muncy and Kiké Hernández – who always seem to be coming up with the clutch hit.
That, as much as anything else, will be what determines the series – whether Toronto’s pitching can match what LA’s aces do and give themselves a chance to win. But to me, the Dodgers are just too overwhelming. I think they win it in 5.
HE: There you have it… It’s Dodgers in 5… I think Neil’s probably right. Unless, the Blue Jays win. In that case, I disagree with my old pal. Thanks, Neil!
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