I Guess Shohei Ohtani Does Have a License To Do That

In my free time, I write a newsletter about professional cycling, because my idea of a hobby is “my day job, but on wheels.” (It’s called Wheelysports, you can find it on Medium or sign up here to get it by email. It’s free, it comes out once a week. The last edition was about a guy who had to drop out of a race because of a perineal cyst. It’s fun.)

In the cycling world, there’s a little Slovenian guy named Tadej Pogačar who’s laying waste to all and sundry. The headline figure is that he’s won the Tour de France four times and is going for a record-tying fifth title this summer at age 28, but that undersells how dominant he’s been over the past few years. I don’t think there’s an argument anymore, he’s the best to ever do it.

And it’s not just that Pogačar is the best bike racer in the world; he’s the best at every component of the sport, which is incredibly rare. That level of versatility is basically unheard of since the days of Eddy Merckx, who is the Babe Ruth of cycling.

Pogačar’s feats are awe-inspiring, and every week it seems like he sets a new record or does something historic, but after years of writing about him, I’m starting to run out of things to say. There are no more superlatives left to lavish upon so great an athlete.

Sound like anyone you know?

The elevator pitch for Shohei Ohtani was that he would be among the best hitters in the league and among the best pitchers in the league, at the same time. As we now know, those expectations have undersold him somewhat. In 2024 and 2025, he was the best hitter in the National League, and now, Ohtani is leading the major leagues in ERA, at 0.97.

Obviously it’s early. You know how I can tell? No. 2 in ERA is Ohtani’s teammate Justin Wrobleski, who has 15 strikeouts and 10 walks in 36 innings but an ERA of 1.25. (Now that’s something I’ve never seen before, maybe I should be writing about Wrobleski instead.)

I don’t know that Ohtani is really doing anything revolutionary this season. It’s still a seven-pitch arsenal with upper-90s velocity on his four-seamer and sinker. To righties, it’s mostly four-seamer and sweeper, which has been his strategy of choice since about 2022. Against lefties, he is throwing 48% four-seamers, and 20% each curveballs and splitters.

The approach to righties is pretty conventional, at least for a pitcher who can hit 100 mph and conjure a sweeper that doesn’t feel the effects of gravity. A lot of hard-throwing fastball-sweeper guys (Paul Skenes, Griffin Jax, Orion Kerkering, Gavin Williams) like to use their sinker more than Ohtani does, but they’re all broadly in the same family. Here’s Ohtani’s stuff against righties.

And here’s Kerkering’s.

If you can throw 100 mph from a 35ish-degree arm angle, and spin a sweeper, then that seems like a good way to go after same-handed batters. It works, so while Ohtani has tinkered with the pitch mix, he’s kept the same basic approach across many years, multiple teams, and multiple arm injuries.

Ohtani’s approach to lefties, however, is less stable.

Over the years, he’s gone more or less splitter, more or less sinker, more or less cutter. The cutter survived both his most recent Tommy John surgery and the move across Southern California, but he’s not really throwing it this year. Ohtani’s slider is also basically a show-me pitch at this point.

His four most common pitches against lefties are the obvious ones to pick. You’ve got the foundational pitch (the four-seamer), a pitch designed for use against opposite-handed hitters (the splitter), and his best secondary pitch (the sweeper). And then there’s the curveball.

Ohtani’s curveball averages 23.5 mph slower than his fastball, which you can’t tell by looking at this graph, because the difference in induced movement between the two pitches is almost 30 inches vertically and almost 20 inches horizontally. Imagine having to cover both 100 mph at the top of the zone and this cloverleaf highway interchange of a breaking ball. I’d call in sick.

Consider what Ohtani’s throwing this year versus last year. His regular-season contributions were minimal in 2025: a 2.87 ERA, but in only 47 innings. He will eclipse last year’s innings total in the next two weeks unless he gets hurt again. And last year, Ohtani’s regular-season pitching goal was not necessarily to perform at the top level right from the jump. It was about getting back into shape for the playoffs after nearly two years away from his last competitive pitch.

So he got a little kitchen sink-y in 2025. His four-seamer usage to lefties was the same — the heater is the rock upon which Ohtani’s church is built — but he threw five different pitches between 8% and 12% of the time against them. I don’t even want to call that a plan; that’s a mystery box.

In Ohtani’s second season as a Dodgers pitcher, he’s gone for simplicity. Two pitches for righties, three for lefties. He’s still throwing the other three pitches occasionally, but they’re only to be broken out for special occasions.

Because the basic stuff is working. You can see the curveball-fastball combination to Zach Cole here.

And Ohtani follows that up with… wait, were Todd Kalas and Geoff Blum singing “Ms. Jackson” by Outkast during that pitch? I was going to be surprised by how hip and with it those two are, but “Ms. Jackson” is older now than “SOS” by ABBA was when “Ms. Jackson” came out, so Outkast is basically classic rock these days.

I completely lost my train of thought. Oh, right, the 0-2 fastball.

The first pitch of this at-bat was a sweeper at the bottom of the zone, so Cole’s timing is probably completely cooked by this point. The ball is almost past him by the time he actually gets his swing going.

You’re probably waiting for the big moment from Ohtani’s last start. Well, I’m getting there.

Ohtani closed the fifth inning by getting Jose Altuve to swing at a pitch that was 3.23 feet from the center of home plate, making this the wildest chase by a right-handed batter in just under four years.

Obviously, this is a ridiculous swing, not just because the ball is so far off the plate, but because of who’s swinging the bat. I mean, there’s precedent for this.

But don’t forget, Altuve and Ohtani were division rivals for six years. Altuve actually has more regular-season at-bats against Ohtani than any other hitter. Surely he of all people knows not to swing at a pitch that’s, well, nearly two-thirds of an Altuve from the center of the plate.

Let’s play along with Altuve for a second. That wild sweeper was the sixth pitch of the at-bat. He had fouled off the previous three.

He’s trying to protect the outside corner of the plate from a 101-mph fastball on the black, which was literally the last pitch he saw.

He knew to swing because at 1-0, he took another fastball on the outside corner, perhaps thinking it was a sweeper, and got dinged with a called strike.

And in between those two pitches, he got this.

A sweeper that was itself miles off the plate. Altuve got fooled, but he stepped into the pitch and managed to tag it with the end of the bat. Why wouldn’t he assume he could get to another sweeper if one came?

Altuve might’ve looked foolish in the end, but I see where he’s coming from. And I empathize; hitting against Ohtani is a tough assignment at the moment. Much harder, it turns out, than finding something new to say about him.