Angels News: Early Home Runs Fueled Shohei Ohtani's Record 13 Strikeouts

At this point in the 2023 season, Angels fans and any fans of their opposing team are well-aware that they will be in for a show whenever Shohei Ohtani is the starting pitcher. He's really only had one poor outing of six games for the Halos this year in which he's taken the mound and even when that one outlier performance against the Oakland A's, it caught many by shock.

And that is for a reason. The 28-year-old superstar has a reputation like nobody else as he'll strike out ten of your top batters and then go on to take your starting pitcher deep that same inning.

In Wednesday's 6-4win over the Cardinals, things were no different as despite two home runs given up early, Ohtani went on to tie a career-high in strikeouts with 13. His charisma clearly changed after those two dingers and he revealed after the game that they played a motivating factor in his overall performance.

Sho-ing off 🦄

Shohei Ohtani matched his single-game MLB career high in strikeouts (13) and now has 500 career pitching strikeouts, being one shy of matching Babe Ruth's career total (501). pic.twitter.com/bL0e5PjDS2
— Los Angeles Angels (@Angels) May 4, 2023

“Obviously I gave up a couple of homers,” Ohtani said through his interpreter. “Those hurt. I wanted to get through six or seven innings minimum. More than the strikeouts. I’m more disappointed that I couldn’t get that far in the game.”

(Via The OC Register)

Both Jake Lamb and Mike Trout came up huge to ensure that Ohtani's pitching record would remain undefeated this season with their own clutch home runs in the ninth inning and things are looking up for LA right now.

Ohtani is focusing on what he could do better because that's just the type of players he is but it was still more than a solid outing for him. He is currently posting a 1,85 ERA that jumped up a little bit after this game and a WHIP of 0.87.

Most strikeouts in an MLB game
when the pitcher pitched 5 innings:
13 - Zack Greinke, 9/25/12
13 - Jacob deGrom, 9/18/22
13 - Shohei Ohtani, 5/3/23pic.twitter.com/02Yrio7FQP
— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) May 4, 2023

It should be very exciting for Angels fans to see that despite their superstar not being perfect, the rest of the roster can still turn out a win!