Breaking Down Shohei Ohtani’s Bid for the Best Month in Baseball History
On Friday night, Shohei Ohtani did as he usually does, which is to say he made something extraordinary look completely routine.
In the sixth inning of an eventual loss against the Diamondbacks, he crushed a pitch to right field, a soaring, dramatic marvel of a moonshot. The official projected distance was 493 feet: Ohtani’s league-leading 30th home run of the season and the farthest hit ball of the year. Only a dozen longer had been recorded since MLB began tracking distance with Statcast in 2015.
It was a home run to rip apart the phrase “no-doubter”: This did not obliterate doubt so much as it invited belief. The broadcast caught his generational talent of a teammate Mike Trout slack-jawed in the on-deck circle. It was one of Ohtani’s last plate appearances for the month of June—he’d have just one more, leading off the bottom of the eighth that night, drawing a walk and scoring—and it capped a month unlike any baseball has ever seen.
Ohtani tends to invite language that feels like hyperbole. The usual descriptions feel trite, pointless, for the two-way wonder, and so people stretch for tortured metaphors and wild descriptors. But much as this may sound like over-the-top, silly exaggeration, know that it is true:
This very well may have been the best month ever by an individual baseball player.
The numbers are so remarkable they feel almost difficult to grasp. In June, Ohtani posted a 286 OPS+ on a triple-slash of .394/.492/.952, and a 3.26 ERA in 30.1 innings pitched with 11.0 K/9. It should go without saying that no one has ever put up a stat line quite like that before. (Who could have?) But it’s not simply that no one has done this because no one else has been in a position to try. It’s more than that.
Look for players who posted a 285 OPS+ in a month with at least 100 plate appearances. There aren’t many: It’s been done just 28 times by 15 players in MLB’s century and a half of history. Those players are…
Babe Ruth (six times, all of them after he stopped pitching to focus on hitting), Barry Bonds (five times), Shoeless Joe Jackson (three times), Ty Cobb (two times), Ted Williams (two times), Jason Giambi, Hank Greenberg, Harry Heilmann, Todd Helton, Rogers Hornsby, Frank Howard, Roy Sievers, Frank Thomas and Carl Yastrzemski. And now—of course—Ohtani.
That’s a list of the best hitters in baseball history, plus a few very, very talented others. They are almost exclusively automatic Hall of Famers and players who but for their own bad decisions would have been automatic Hall of Famers. If “285 OPS+” didn’t sufficiently communicate it, those names should: This is more than just a really good month. This is a month so good that it demands the best of all time to be at their best. There is no way for a player to stumble backwards into the hot streak of his life and have it be a month like this. (The only name here who might be worthy of that designation is Roy Siever—who was vexed by injuries throughout his career but was nonetheless Rookie of the Year and a five-time All-Star.) There is no questioning this company. The Ohtani we saw in June gained admission to a small, exclusive group of the game’s best hitters at their absolute best.
Shohei Ohtani watches as one of his many home runs this season leaves the confines of Angel Stadium.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
And there’s more. Ohtani hit 15 home runs in June, which stands out even among this group of historically strong hitting performances. Indeed: The only players on the list whose incredible month included 15 or more home runs are Bonds, Ruth, Greenberg and Howard. It’s quite a set! But Ohtani differentiated himself even more. He’s tied for MLB’s lead in triples with five, and in June, he recorded three of those. You could probably guess that neither Bonds nor Howard had a single triple in their historic slugging months; Ruth was the only one of the group to post three or more. But Ruth did not steal any bases. Ohtani? He stole four this month. No one with this many home runs in a month this hot ever stole this many bases.
Now, you can say this is pointless statistical finagling, tortured contortions in service of a fun fact, and you won’t be wrong. There is no reason to care about the first player to post a 285 OPS+ in a month with at least 100 plate appearances, 15 home runs, four steals and three triples. (“500 home run club,” it ain’t.) But it’s illustrative. There have been players who hit this well with this kind of power—very, very few of them over more than a century of baseball, all of them historic talents. But none has ever shown this kind of speed. Ohtani hit this June like no one else.
Which covers only half of his game.
Ohtani posted a 3.26 ERA this month with a strikeout rate of 11 per nine innings. He made five starts and averaged a little more than six innings in each. (The league average this year is scarcely five.) This performance on the mound does not compare to his performance at the plate: You will not find this on a very short list of historic months by Hall of Famers.
But you know what people generally call someone with a 3.26 ERA with a strikeout rate of 11 per nine? They generally call him a great pitcher. A productive major leaguer—front half of any rotation, easily, an ace with the right timing on the right team. It is not an understatement to say that people devote their lives to figuring out how to record a 3.26 ERA with a strikeout rate of 11 per nine. That’s true not just of the pitchers themselves, but of the coaches, the support staff, the front office analysts. This is the goal. Only a tiny select group ever find themselves in a position to try for anything beyond this. It is the dream.
For Ohtani, it felt more like a footnote. It was one last piece to add to the conversation. “By the way, you know, he did this, too.” Here is what might otherwise be the work of a lifetime, scrawled in the margins of the calendar, filling whatever gaps could possibly exist in a month almost too good to believe.
