The superlatives to describe Shohei Ohtani’s performance this October are running out as quickly as Dodger Stadium ran out of food in Monday’s marathon World Series game.
And on Tuesday, he’s about to once again do something baseball has never seen.
Ohtani’s monster 4-4 night – which included two home runs, two doubles, an astonishing five walks and 12 total bases – helped the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 6-5 win in 18 innings on Monday. The game ended just before midnight Pacific time, giving the Japanese superstar about 17 hours to rest and recuperate before he takes the mound as LA’s starter in Game 4 on Tuesday night.
“He’s spent. He was on base eight, nine times tonight, running the bases. He’s elated. But, yeah, he’s taking the mound tomorrow. He’ll be ready,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said after Monday’s game.
Six hours and 39 minutes of baseball is a long night. CNN’s Andy Scholes chronicled passing the time and searching for a Dodger Dog at the historic Game 3 of the World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Roberts may have lost count, as Ohtani was officially on base nine times in a single game – a new postseason record. His two home runs and two doubles made him the second player ever to have four extra base hits in a World Series game. He’s the first player in postseason history to have multiple doubles, multiple homers and multiple walks in the same postseason game, and the second player to ever do it in history.
And that’s not all. He’s the first player to have four intentional walks in a postseason game, the first player with three multi-homer games in the same postseason, is tied for the most career postseason home runs by a Japanese player with Hideki Matsui and his eight home runs in the 2025 postseason are tied for second all time.
To put it mildly, all of that taken together is frankly insane.
“Shohei’s game, I hope we don’t lose sight of … our starting pitcher tomorrow got on base nine times tonight,” said Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers first baseman who hit the walk-off solo shot that finally won the game for Los Angeles in the 18th inning on Monday.
“Just incredible.”
After all that, Ohtani is set to take the mound at Dodger Stadium – a mind-boggling thought all on its own given the standard treatment of starting pitchers in modern baseball.
Starting pitchers these days are usually creatures of habit. Typically, they pitch every five days and have strict fitness regimens that they follow on each of those days to get themselves ready to hit peak performance. It’s not unheard of for starters to leave a game early if they’re starting the next day to ensure they get enough rest.
Ohtani, though, is far from typical. And it’s not a stretch that Tuesday’s start will put his postseason in a category all its own, surpassing even the legendary achievements of Babe Ruth.
Ruth is obviously the easiest comparison for Ohtani’s career, as absurd as that feels. The Great Bambino was his era’s most prolific home run hitter and started his career as one of the game’s best pitchers as well. But even the Babe never played in a six-and-a-half-hour World Series game and then pitched the next day – when he was still pitching for the Boston Red Sox in 1916 and 1918, none of the games in those World Series lasted more than two-and-a-half hours.
The last time Ohtani took the mound was in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, turning in a sterling six innings, allowing two hits and striking out 10 batters. In that same game, he hit three home runs becoming the 12th hitter to hit three homers in a playoff game.
But to do both of those things in the same game? Unheard of. No player had ever struck out 10 hitters and hit multiple home runs in the same contest.
When Ohtani takes the mound tonight in Chavez Ravine, he’ll have the opportunity to put his team on the verge of clinching a second-straight World Series championship, which hasn’t been done since the dynasty New York Yankees teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But don’t count on him having too many more opportunities to hurt the Toronto Blue Jays at the plate. The AL champions are planning on continuing the strategy they developed in the late innings on Monday: Simply walking Ohtani every chance they get.
“We’re trying to pitch around him,” said John Schneider, the Blue Jays’ manager, of Ohtani’s seventh-inning home run that tied the game and set the stage for the 18-inning marathon.
He added, “Sometimes, for pitchers, it’s hard to do that when you’re kind of trying to throw a ball and didn’t put it where you want to put it. But he had a great game, he’s great player, but I think after that, you just kind of take the bat out of his hands.”
When asked if he plans on issuing Ohtani intentional walks going forward, Schneider simply said, “Yeah.”
Roberts said he understands.
“He’s the best player on the planet, and he was on the heels of a huge offensive night, and John smelled that and wasn’t going to let Shohei beat him at all, obviously,” the Dodgers manager said, “and even when nobody’s on base and putting him on to make the other guys beat him. Respect it and, fortunately, we have other guys behind Shohei that can still do some things.”