Shohei Ohtani is doing things on a baseball field that nobody else in human history has done, and somehow we are still finding ways to undersell what is actually happening. He punched out eight Giants over seven scoreless innings on Tuesday night and dropped his ERA to 0.82 on the season. The Dodgers basically have an unfair advantage written into their lineup.
Look at those numbers. A 0.82 ERA. Eight strikeouts in seven innings. After missing all of 2024 because of elbow surgery and easing back into pitching last year, Ohtani has come back as the most dominant starter in the National League and is the runaway favorite for NL Pitcher of the Month every month from here.
He won April’s NL Pitcher of the Month award with a 0.60 ERA across his first month of starts. May is shaping up the same way. The Dodgers are atop the NL West, the rotation has its share of injury concerns elsewhere, and Ohtani keeps showing up every fifth day to dominate while batting third in the lineup.
That is the part that still does not compute. He is the best pitcher in the league and one of the five best hitters. Dave Roberts confirmed Ohtani will both hit and pitch on his start days going forward, which the Dodgers had been managing more carefully early in the season. Roberts trusts Ohtani’s body. The two-way experiment is back at full strength.
The bigger picture for the Dodgers is the most important part. This team was already loaded. Mookie Betts is back from his oblique injury. Freddie Freeman has been Freddie Freeman. Will Smith is producing behind the plate. Now you add Ohtani as a frontline starter to a rotation that includes Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow when those guys are healthy.
The defending champions are not just defending. They are stacking another super team and waiting to see who can challenge them in October. Right now, that team is the Phillies in the NL and basically nobody else looks ready to make a real run. The American League is more wide open with the Yankees, Tigers, and Mariners all in the mix, but the Dodgers are the obvious favorite to come out of the National League again.
What makes Ohtani’s pitching so unhittable right now is that the splitter is back. Not the version he was throwing two years ago. A better one. The pitch tunnels with his fastball perfectly, the velocity has not dropped, and he can throw it for strikes or as a chase pitch. Hitters are guessing, and Ohtani is taking advantage of every mistake.
The fastball is sitting at 99 and touching triple digits. The slider is wipeout. The splitter is unhittable. He is six pitches deep in his arsenal, and any one of them can put a hitter away. That is what makes him special. Most pitchers have one or two elite weapons. Ohtani has four.
The Cy Young race is over before it really started. He is going to win it. He is also going to finish in the top three of MVP voting because he is also going to hit 40 home runs and drive in 110 runs while batting third in the most stacked lineup in baseball. We have never seen anything like this.
The Dodgers are going to win another World Series. Ohtani is going to win the NL Cy Young and possibly add another MVP to his trophy case. The rest of the league has six months to figure out an answer, and there is not one coming. Sit back and enjoy the show. We are watching one of the great single seasons in the history of the sport unfold in real time.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
