Baseball Bytes: Shohei Ohtani’s GOAT Game For 50-50

Plus, the Tigers make an unlikely surge toward the postseason.

Welcome to Baseball Bytes¹ — a column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!

⚾ Ohtani The GOAT

(Photo by Megan Briggs/Getty Images)

Nobody has a flair for the dramatic quite like Shohei Ohtani.

With MLB’s first-ever 50-homer/50-steal season within reach last week, Ohtani didn’t just seize the moment — he obliterated it. On Thursday night against the Miami Marlins, Ohtani got his 50th steal (swiping third base in the first inning) and then mashed his 50th home run (off of Mike Baumann in the seventh). But this only scratches the surface of what he did: Ohtani also had five other hits in addition to the record HR, producing eight additional RBIs, and added another steal for good measure.

His eventual stat line for the game — 6-for-6, 2 doubles, 3 home runs, 10 RBIs, 2 stolen bases — was quite possibly the most dazzling single-game performance of our lifetimes, with or without considering the context of the 50-50 season.

"That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time," teammate Gavin Lux said afterwards. "It has to be. There's no way. It's ridiculous. I've never seen anybody do that even in little leagues, so it's crazy that he's doing that at the highest level."

At the prompting of friend and reader Andrew Flowers, I wanted to look at just where The Ohtani Game ranks in a variety of different metrics for single-game performances. Here’s where Ohtani ranks on the all-time lists, per Baseball-Reference’s Stathead and SportRadar’s Radar360 tools:

The last one, Base-Out Runs Added (or RE24), is the best argument (to me) that Ohtani just clinched his 50-50 season with the literal best game by a batter in MLB history.

For those unacquainted with it, that metric looks at how a team’s chances of scoring changed over the course of a player’s plate appearance — or before and after a steal attempt, in the case of baserunners — in a manner very similar to Expected Points Added in football. So it does a good job of quantifying offensive value in a very organic way, reflecting the situational value of coming through when the leverage of the inning is high. And unlike the other metrics above, it also gives Ohtani credit for his stolen bases.

Last Thursday, Ohtani improved the Dodgers’ expected scoring by nearly TEN runs via his offensive actions, breaking the record previously held by Mark “Hittin’” Whiten in his four-homer, 12-RBI game:

And remember, this is a record without any extra consideration for the 50-50 pursuit Ohtani was on at the time. Whiten’s four-homer game clinched his first career 20-HR season — which, while nice, is just a little less prestigious than 50-50. The same goes for fellow Dodger Shawn Green’s 19-runs created game from 2002. Green went on to hit 42 HR that year, part of a stretch where he hit nearly 200 homers in a five-season span, and he formerly held the record Ohtani broke for single-season franchise HR (49 in 2001). But this was otherwise a relatively nondescript late-May game for an L.A. squad that went on to miss the playoffs.

If we do make room for the historical context, Ohtani’s outing legitimately ought to be considered the new gold standard for single-game offensive dominance. And really, who else would upstage their own historic 50-50 milestone with an overall game that was every bit as rare and impressive on the all-time list of showcase performances? Just Shohei Ohtani, that’s who.

⚾ Hold That Tiger

As I noted on Sunday, the Detroit Tigers will enter the final week of the regular season with roughly a coin-flip’s playoff odds, as they hold the AL’s last wild card spot as of Sunday evening.

This is, to put it mildly, a surprising development. The Tigers were projected before the season to maybe scrape .500, which would have been the team’s first non-losing campaign since 2016. They had some notable names on hand, too — Tarik Skubal, Riley Greene, Jack Flaherty, the eternal contract that is Javier Baez, etc. But a lot of things would have to break right to even imagine them being in the thick of a playoff race this late in the schedule.

And in some ways, that’s been true. The Twins have collapsed to one of the league’s worst (non-White Sox) records over the past 30 games, while the Red Sox and Rays have been only a bit better. The Rangers turned it on too little, too late, and so did the Mariners, most likely. In the middle of that, Detroit gained ground simply by not tripping up.

But these Tigers are legitimately good, too. They have a +0.24 runs-per-game differential on the season, which ranks among the top half of MLB teams and is on pace to be the franchise’s best mark since 2014. They’ve played their best down the stretch as well, with a better record over the past 30 games than the Dodgers, Phillies or Padres. (Going into Sunday, only the equally surging Mets were better in that span.)

And Detroit’s current Elo rating of 1520 is the highest it’s been at any point since Sept. 5, 2016 — 2,941 days ago.

What’s amazing is that the Tigers went through multiple different rebuilding cycles in that span. After missing the playoffs despite 86 wins in 2016, Detroit broke up the core of its great-but-not-great-enough teams of the early 2010s and tanked to one of the worst seasons in history in 2019. But that rebuild seemed to stall out and even go backwards again over the past few years. In 2022, the 66-win Tigers sputtered to 11 fewer victories than in 2021, and while they bounced back to 78 wins in 2023, they traded Flaherty and others at the deadline this year — even toying with the idea of selling Skubal.

And yet, here Detroit is, right in the middle of the playoff hunt. And I say it’s about time we heard the Tigers roar again in October.

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Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes

1. Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.