Shohei Ohtani had a record-setting night to send the Los Angeles Dodgers to the World Series for the second-straight time.
In Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, Shohei Ohtani was unstoppable.
The 31-year-old two-way superstar lifted his Los Angeles Dodgers to their second-straight World Series appearance in dominant fashion over the Milwaukee Brewers as he logged three home runs and struck out 10 batters while only allowing three walks and two hits over six innings in a 5-1 win.
Ohtani’s record-setting performance will not be forgotten any time soon, and ESPN has already listed it as one of its favorite games of the 2025 season.
“How can you go wrong with a historic performance by the game's current best player -- if not among the best all time? Shohei Ohtani became the first player to hit three home runs while also striking out 10 hitters as a pitcher, leading his Dodgers back to what would ultimately be their second straight World Series championship,” it wrote.
“Fantasy baseball scoring can give us perspective on how great the performance was: Ohtani's game would've been worth 44 fantasy points using both his hitting and pitching. That's the most by anyone in a playoff game. It's also 11 more than Nick Kurtz's four-homer game or Ohtani's own 6-for-6, three-homer, two-steals game in 2024.”
Ohtani also went 4-for-4 with two home runs and five walks in an 18-inning deathmatch between the Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 3 of the World Series in which Los Angeles prevailed, 6-5. But even the greatness of that performance pales in comparison to Game 4 of the NLCS.
“The only games worth more were Kerry Wood's 20-strikeout game in 1998 (48), Max Scherzer's 2015 no-hitter against the New York Mets (46) and pre-1975 games in which pitchers loaded up on points by pitching into extra innings.”
What makes Ohtani’s Game 4 performance even more impressive was that he did not begin pitching in 2025 until the middle of June after a lengthy recovery from a UCL repair in his right elbow in September 2023 and left shoulder surgery in November 2024. He registered only 14 starts before taking the mound in the postseason and only had one start in the playoff before facing Milwaukee’s highly potent offense.
The Brewers scored 806 runs in 2025, their highest total since 1999. Their .279 batting average with runners in scoring position was second in baseball only to the Toronto Blue Jays (.292). Yet, when it came to Ohtani and the Dodgers, points came at a premium.