Before this season, pitching was pretty clearly Shohei Ohtani’s secondary talent, and that’s not an insult. He was just “also a pitcher” in the same way that Lady Gaga is also an actress or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is also a writer. In his first two seasons as a Dodger, Ohtani only pitched a total of 47 innings as he recovered from elbow and then shoulder surgery, yet he was still the best baseball player in the world. The fact that he might take the mound every fifth or sixth day when healthy and deliver above-average starts was just icing on top of 50-plus homers and a 1.000+ OPS, and also that one year where he stole 59 bases seemingly just to prove he could.
In his ninth season in MLB, the power hitting is a notch lower than we’re used to, but Ohtani remains a spectacular hitter: .301 average, NL-best on-base percentage, 165 OPS+. But this time, in something far beyond a simple return to form since his injury, Ohtani’s pitching stats are the ones that truly drop the jaw. Through 10 starts, Ohtani has given up just five earned runs over 61 innings, which is good for a 0.74 ERA to go along with a microscopic 0.787 WHIP. Wednesday’s outing against Arizona, which the Dodgers won 7-0, was another display of efficiency. Ohtani went six innings allowing just two hits and one walk. He stranded Gabriel Moreno after a two-out double in the fourth, and on his final pitch he got Corbin Carroll to ground into a double play to escape what qualified for him as a jam. That’s all the action to speak of—well, except for the fact that Ohtani also picked up three singles and two walks at the plate. Jeez, man. Take a look at some of the highlights from the D-Backs game:
Wait, sorry. These are the Ohtani highlights.
Pretty great! What’s really working for him is the fastball/sweeper combo, in a different way that it used to. Back when Ohtani was a full-fledged starter with the Angels, he was on the forefront of the MLB sweeper trend, relying heavily on dramatic horizontal movement to generate swings and misses (like when he struck out Mike Trout to end the World Baseball Classic). In 2022, when he finished fourth in Cy Young voting, his fastball was just kind of there to offset the sweeper—it didn’t hurt him, but it wasn’t anything impressive on its own.
Since coming back from injury, however, Ohtani is firing significantly more fastballs at a higher velocity than he used to, and in tandem with the sweeper it forms a ferocious one-two punch that has left hitters looking ridiculous, like Jose Altuve in one especially unfortunate chase. This video is particularly instructive for understanding how Ohtani’s been so unhittable. There’s a drastic gap in speed and movement between the fastball and the sweeper, but the way Ohtani disguises them for the first part of their journey to the catcher, hitters are basically waving and praying.
If Ohtani were just a talented pitcher who was able to learn and improve in a linear way year after year, that would be impressive but normal. If Ohtani were just a really cool two-way player who put his hitting to the side to work at honing his skills on the mound after his surgeries, that would more or less track, too. But the actual numbers just do not add up, because Ohtani is performing as if he has 35 hours a day to practice baseball. The guy with the 0.74 ERA is also the NL’s leader in OBP. The pitcher with an ERA+ I’ve literally never seen before—546!—is also the hitter with a .941 OPS on a team that’s 40-22. It does not make sense! It boggles the mind so thoroughly that it’s tempting to just not think too hard or too often about how impossible Shohei Ohtani should be. That’d be doing yourself a disservice.
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