The Golden Age of Ohtani
With back-to-back rings, 17.6 WAR across 2 seasons and hits + innings in the same World Series, Ohtani's 2024-25 stands as one of baseball's greatest peaks.
At one point early in Game 4 of the 2025 World Series, with Shohei Ohtani taking the mound to make his first-ever Fall Classic start, it re-dawned on me that I had better really, truly appreciate this while it lasts.
Sometimes, what Ohtani does — the MVP-level hitting and Cy Young-caliber pitching, all at once — is so outside the realm of what seems real and possible that it’s oddly easy to take for granted. Even after working his way back from multiple injuries that carried questions about how long he could keep doing it, Ohtani seems so natural both on the mound and at the plate that it can trick you into thinking this is normal: That baseball was always meant to be played this way, by one person doing everything.
But in that moment, I realized that what we were seeing might never be seen again. Even if the series went seven games — not a guarantee — Ohtani wouldn’t be scheduled to start again if L.A. followed its usual rotation pattern. And you can never be sure how starters will be used in relief. There was a chance that this was it — his first and only start in a World Series, the fleeting peak of a two-way career that already feels like a baseball miracle.
Until it wasn’t — and he reappeared, improbably, in Game 7, after Dave Roberts ran through Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow (briefly) in Games 5-6. This set up Ohtani to start again, for however many innings he could go, in a strategic move to get him pitching while preserving his bat for the rest of the game (per DH rules). It was half necessity, half a testament to Ohtani himself — the kind of baseball logic that only exists because he does. And it gave us another chance to admire a newly historic career chapter for a player who is already the greatest all-around talent the sport has ever witnessed.
In winning back-to-back World Series as the best player on both Dodger teams, Ohtani already joined a rare club. According to Wins Above Replacement, it was just the ninth time in MLB history that a player could make that claim, and the first since Derek Jeter in 1998-99:
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