Was Shohei Ohtani’s NLCS Game 4 the greatest baseball performance of all time? Who wins the World Series? A conversation

Baseball fans continue to marvel at Shohei Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series.

He hit three home runs and pitched six shutout innings. This left a lot of people wondering and saying outright that it was the greatest playoff effort of all time.

But was it? I discussed this, Ohtani’s overall impact on baseball and the upcoming World Series with my old friend and sports expert, Mr. Neil Paine. It manages its own substack.

Harry Enten (IL): I checked and Ohtani is the first pitcher to hit two, let alone three home runs in a playoff game. He is also just the 10th pitcher to go at least six innings, allowing two hits, no runs and striking out at least 10. Is there something I’m missing here?

Neil Paine (NP): That’s interesting. Technically, there have probably been games in history where someone added more total value either with the bat Or the throwing arm that Ohtani did combined last week. For example, there is a stat called Run Expectancy Added that indicates how much a hitter improved his team’s chances of scoring (or a pitcher reduced the opponent’s chances) – and in that stat, Ohtani had a rating of +5.16 between his batting (+3.13) and his pitching (2.03). There were 10 hitting playoff games where someone added more value than Ohtani overall, and 10 pitching playoff games where they could say the same thing.

And yet, there’s something about the “unicorn” nature of what Ohtani has done that makes it seem like he should get extra credit, beyond what the raw numbers say. None of these 10 hitters also pitched, or vice versa, and having just one guy do both is almost completely unprecedented. The best combined run expectancy added by Babe Ruth in a playoff game that he also pitched was just +4.01.

It’s almost one of those definitional things where, if it’s Ohtani’s greatest combined hitting and pitching game — and it was, according to Run Expectancy — it also has to be the best combined game of them all because he’s the only guy who’s ever really tried that sort of thing (at least among modern players).

HE: I love advanced stats because they bring everything together. You make a pretty convincing argument that it wasn’t the “best”… but that makes me think we’re using the wrong words here.

The right word is historical. Ohtani literally made history. It’s one of a kind, which means truly unique, even if it’s not the best.

NP: Or what I really like is what my fellow Substacker (and fellow Ivy grad) Doug Glanville called what Shohei tends to do: “Ohtanic.” It’s a special kind of thing that not only has never been done before, but up until about ten years ago we didn’t even think about it. possible in the game.

HE: I think this is part of Ohtani’s playbook as a whole. I’ve seen people online stating that Ohtani is the best or the best of all time.

But anyone can look at it and see that there have been people who have done better. There are people who have hit more home runs, for example. There have been people who have had higher wins than replacement (or WAR, an advanced stat that seeks to measure a player’s overall contribution).

But then you look at players who threw at least 5% of the time. Only Ohtani and Ruth have hit 100 or more home runs. Ohtani has hit nearly 300 home runs and has plenty left in his career.

He is truly one of a kind for players of the last 90 years.

NP: Well, I want to go back to one thing you said: “Anyone can look it up.” It’s actually surprisingly difficult to find the combined run expectancy stats I mentioned above, for example. And only in the last few years has FanGraphs even added a combined WAR ranking, pretty much in response to Ohtani’s existence.

I think that really brings us back to the one-of-a-kind aspect – when these statistical sites or historical resources were created in the 21st century, it had been so long since there was a really viable hitter/pitcher hybrid like this that they didn’t even think they would need to mix player stats in the two activities. Ohtani has broken the way we do seemingly simple stat lookups with these exploits that fall so far outside the bounds of what is usually considered “normal” for the purposes of gaming reporting.

HE: This might be the sweetest reaction in history, ha ha. You know, I read what you wrote here, and it really shows how Ohtani breaks traditional metrics. It forces us to think about baseball differently.

You know, I’ve written a number of articles in the past about how baseball viewership is down from its peaks – although it’s up a bit this year.

Ohtani makes these comparisons somewhat unnecessary. For what? It attracts so many international viewers. More precisely, those from Japan. In Japan, more people watched this season’s Tokyo Series featuring the Los Angeles Dodgers than Americans did last year’s World Series.

Baseball nearly doubled its audience during last year’s World Series thanks to Japan, even though those games were played in the morning in Tokyo.

NP: The Dodgers have truly become Japan’s team in recent years, and Ohtani unsurprisingly finds himself in the middle of it. It gave them the most valuable Japanese hitter in the league by WAR, and the team also had the most valuable Japanese pitcher in Yoshinobu Yamamoto – as well as two other positive value pitchers in the form of Roki Sasaki and Ohtani himself.

Whenever a great player is sent out by the NPB (Japan’s version of MLB), the Dodgers are either the first to sign him or at least on the very short list of candidates, in part because of the talent pool they have already built in Los Angeles.

And then that creates a virtuous cycle where the Dodgers get a lot of attention from fans in Japan, and when they do well, that makes them a more attractive destination for the next generation of players to come, and so on.

We used to associate the (Seattle) Mariners and (New York) Yankees with acquiring Japanese stars as well – think Ichiro (Suzuki) and Hideki Matsui, for example – but the Dodgers have always been the initial destination since Hideo Nomo, and they have reasserted themselves in that regard once again, to the benefit of their brand and MLB as a whole.

HE: Again, this is a situation where Ohtani is simply unique. Yes, these guys were big in Japan, but Ohtani is just different. Additionally, the way baseball has capitalized on him is also different.

HE: And thanks to that, we are now in a World Series that truly feels more “global” than ever. We had the popularity of the game in Japan and the Toronto Blue Jays are involved.

Of course, there can only be one winner. Prediction markets have the Dodgers as more than a 2-to-1 favorite against the team whose flag flies north of the border. What do you say?

NP: I’m just old enough to remember when they made a big deal about the Blue Jays facing the Atlanta Braves in 1992 in the first true international “World” Series. Look how far we’ve come!

But yeah, the Dodgers are pretty heavy favorites, and it’s hard to argue with that after what they did to the Milwaukee Brewers — who had the best record in baseball during the regular season — in what was a very lopsided and brutal NLCS sweep.

The things that I think indicate Toronto has a chance is that the Dodgers starters opted out of their spirits during this series: they literally had the best turnover ERA (0.63) ever seen in a League Championship Series. That may not be able to repeat for a second straight series, even though they are coming off a near-record amount of rest heading into the Fall Classic.

The Blue Jays are also much better offensively than Milwaukee – they are averaging 6.5 RPG in the postseason with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. having a 1.440 OPS. And then if you get to the Dodger bullpen, you’re facing a group that was outside the top 20 in WAR during the regular season.

But what makes the Dodgers so dangerous is the number of players who can hurt you. If it’s not Ohtani – and it’s worth pointing out that, despite the mammoth Game 4 we talked about earlier, he was hitting below .200 in the NLCS before, but they were still dominating – it could be Freddie Freeman, or Mookie Betts, or a group of guys – like Tommy Edman, Teoscar Hernández, Max Muncy and Kiké Hernández – who always seem to find the clutch shot.

That, among other things, will determine the series: whether Toronto’s pitchers can match what the Los Angeles aces are doing and give themselves a chance to win. But for me, the Dodgers are just too overwhelming. I think they win it in 5.

HE: There you go… It’s the Dodgers in 5… I think Neil is probably right. Unless the Blue Jays win. In this case, I disagree with my ex-boyfriend. Thanks, Neil!