LOS ANGELES -- Mookie Betts stood on the Dodger Stadium field Friday night, a commemorative World Series cap on his head and a wide smile on his face, and made what felt like an apt comparison moments after the Los Angeles Dodgers completed a National League Championship Series sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers.
"It's like we're the Chicago Bulls," Betts said, "and he's Michael Jordan."
Betts was referring, of course, to Shohei Ohtani, who had once again put together a performance many of his peers described as the greatest in baseball history. On the mound, he pitched six scoreless innings and struck out 10. In the batter's box, he clobbered three home runs, one of which might have left the ballpark. And when it was over, and the Dodgers clinched a second straight pennant on an Ohtani-fueled 5-1 victory in Game 4 of the NLCS, his teammates once again struggled to make sense of it.
"Some human, huh?" Dodgers utility man Enrique Hernandez said of Ohtani, the NLCS MVP, despite being almost nonexistent for the first three games.
"I can't wait for when I'm a little bit older and my kids are asking about, 'What's the greatest thing you've ever seen in baseball?'" third baseman Max Muncy said. "I can't wait to pull up this game today. That's the single best performance in the history of baseball. I don't care what anyone says. Obviously, I don't know what happened a hundred years ago, but that's the single best performance I've ever seen in my life."
Ohtani entered Game 4 with just three hits and 14 strikeouts in 29 at-bats over his previous seven games, a slump so pronounced and so prolonged it prompted a very rare session of outdoor batting practice. Questions swirled about whether attempting to be a two-way player in the postseason was affecting his hitting, a thought at least partly backed by his struggles at the plate when he started on the mound during the regular season.
Ultimately, though, it was doing both that set him free.
"No one puts more pressure on himself than Shohei," Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. Focusing on pitching, Dodgers hitting coach Aaron Bates believes, "actually took his mind off the hitting a little bit."
"It let him go be an athlete in the box," Bates said. "It let him just play baseball."
Ohtani became the first player in major league history to hit two home runs as a pitcher in a postseason game, let alone three, according to ESPN Research. He hit more home runs than he allowed hits (two), also a first. Before him, no pitcher -- at any stage in the season -- had hit a leadoff home run, and no player had accumulated three home runs as a hitter and 10 strikeouts as a pitcher. Ohtani is the first player in Dodgers history to homer as a pitcher in the postseason and the second to have a three-homer performance in an LCS-clinching game, joining Hernandez's performance from 2017.
"I played left field that time," Hernandez said, "and I didn't get to punch all those people that he punched out."
The Dodgers responded to their 2024 championship, their first in a full season in 36 years, by doubling down on a star-laden roster, coming away with another impressive group in free agency. They entered the ensuing season with expectations of challenging Major League Baseball's regular-season-wins record. A 23-10 start only strengthened that belief.
But the Dodgers won just two more times than they lost over their next 110 games. For much of the season, they were basically mediocre. Their rotation was hurt, their bullpen was a mess and their lineup was inconsistent. Around their lowest point, while in Baltimore during the first weekend of September, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts called a team meeting in an effort to inject confidence in his players. They responded by winning 15 of their last 20 regular-season games, looking every bit like the juggernaut so many expected.
It continued in the playoffs.
The Dodgers breezed past the Cincinnati Reds in the wild-card round, dispatched the Philadelphia Phillies in four NL Division Series games, then completely stifled the No. 1-seeded Brewers, limiting them to four runs on 14 hits in 36 innings. Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Ohtani combined for an 0.63 ERA in the NLCS. In 10 playoff games, they're a combined 9-1 with a 1.40 ERA.
"We knew going into October that the strength of our club was going to be our starters," Friedman said. "For them to do what they did eclipsed even our expectations."
Ohtani took the ball on 12 days' rest, allowed a leadoff walk to Brice Turang, then struck out Jackson Chourio and Christian Yelich on back-to-back 100 mph fastballs, an early sign to teammates and coaches that he had brought his best stuff with him. Another strikeout, on a sweeper to William Contreras, followed.
Ohtani then walked briskly toward the third-base dugout, put on his helmet, strapped on his elbow and shin guards, raced to put on his batting gloves and approached the batter's box. In moments like these, the Dodgers had noticed Ohtani rushing at-bats, almost as if his mind was too locked in on pitching. This time, he worked the count full against Jose Quintana, turned on a low-and-inside slurve and produced a titanic 446-foot home run.
Something different was clearly brewing.
"When the starting pitcher strikes out the side and then goes and hits a home run, you think, 'Whoa, this is something special,'" Dodgers president Stan Kasten said.
"That's the single best performance in the history of baseball. I don't care what anyone says. Obviously I don't know what happened a hundred years ago, but that's the single best performance I've ever seen in my life." Max Muncy on Shohei Ohtani
The Brewers did not record their first hit until Chourio led off the fourth inning with a ground-rule double. Ohtani followed by getting Yelich to ground out, then striking out Contreras and Jake Bauers. Ohtani came to bat again in the bottom of the fourth, with two outs, none on and the Dodgers holding a three-run lead. He swung so hard at a Chad Patrick cutter that he sent it 469 feet, clearing the right-center-field bleachers. Ohtani followed with a string of four consecutive strikeouts in the fifth and sixth innings, all on splitters. Ohtani came out for the seventh after throwing 87 pitches, allowed the first two batters to reach and exited to a standing ovation from a sold-out crowd of 52,883. "MVP" chants serenaded him when he came to bat again in the bottom of the seventh -- and Ohtani responded with a 113.6 mph line drive that cleared the wall near straightaway center field, cementing a masterful production.
"That was probably the greatest postseason performance of all time," Roberts said. "There's been a lot of postseason games. And there's a reason why he's the greatest player on the planet."
The 2025 Dodgers are the first team since the 2009 Phillies to return to the World Series one year after winning it, and Los Angeles is just the fifth to ever win nine of its first 10 postseason games -- joining the 2014 Kansas City Royals, 2005 Chicago White Sox, 1999 New York Yankees and 1995 Atlanta Braves.
The Dodgers are the only team to benefit from a performance like this.
Since the mound moved to its current distance in 1893, 1,550 players have struck out 10 batters in a major league game. In that same stretch, 503 players have had a three-homer performance.
Only one has done both simultaneously.
"There's only one person who can do that in the world, and in the history of this game, and it's him," Hernandez said of Ohtani. "He is who he is for a reason."