Shohei Ohtani Is Almost the Best Leadoff Hitter Ever, Again

To no one’s surprise, Shohei Ohtani is having a big season. His 170 wRC+ is second only to Aaron Judge with 192. He’s on pace to tie his career high of 54 home runs. He leads all of baseball with 127 runs scored. Oh, and he’s started doing that pitching thing again. Don’t let his 3.75 ERA fool you. He’s only made 12 appearances and thrown 36 innings, but his 2.47 expected ERA, 2.17 FIP, and 2.53 expected FIP are all career-bests. His average fastball velocity is up. He’s striking out as many batters as ever while slashing his walk rate and avoiding hard contact. There’s no shortage of reasons to write about Ohtani, but our subject today is his spot in the lineup.

Last Tuesday, Ohtani hit his 46th home run. It left his bat at 120 mph, making it the hardest-hit ball of his entire career. I wrote a whole article about it. It was also his 100th home run as a Dodger (in just his second year as a Dodger!). Lost amid all that hoopla was a different milestone. I neglected to mention at the time that it was Ohtani’s 42nd home run of the season from the leadoff spot, which set a new record. It’s the most ever. He also homered twice on Sunday, to push the record to 44. Should we watch all three of those recent home runs? I think it’s best that we do.

The old record was not particularly old. It belonged to Ronald Acuña Jr., who conducted his scorched earth 2023 campaign against the pitchers of the world while batting first for the Braves. In fact, eight of the top 10 seasons have come in the past nine years, five of them in the past four years. That shouldn’t necessarily come as a shock. Home run power has increased over the course of baseball history, and lineup optimization has become the norm over the last several years. Teams are stacking their best hitters in the first and second spots, and the best hitters tend to hit homers. Here’s the top 10 according to our friends at Stathead:

All the same, Ohtani has broken another all-time record, and he’s got 18 more games to push it so high that it’s unlikely to be broken again any time soon (at least by anybody not named Ohtani). It’s worth celebrating. Moreover, it’s not just the home runs. Ohtani is putting up one of the greatest leadoff seasons in major league history. Once again, Stathead can give us the splits. Among players with at least 500 plate appearances in a season out of the leadoff spot, his 1.010 OPS there ranks fourth all time. The player in first? The Dodgers’ current no. 2 batter, Mookie Betts, in 2018 while he was with the Red Sox. Second comes Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson in 1990 and third is Acuña in 2023 again. What do those three players have in common? They all won MVP awards in those particular seasons.

It’s probably too late for Ohtani to catch Betts at the top, but Henderson and Acuña are very much within reach. If we try to compare apples to apples by looking at sOPS+, which compares Ohtani to league-wide leadoff production, we’ll find that he’s at 165, the fifth-highest mark of all time.

I’ve got three more fun facts for you. The first is that although Ohtani is putting up one of the best leadoff campaigns ever, it’s actually not his best leadoff campaign! Ohtani moved to the leadoff spot last year on June 17, right as he was starting his hottest stretch of the entire season. He made 312 plate appearances batting second and 419 batting first. He put up a 171 wRC+ in the second spot and a 187 wRC+ as a leadoff hitter. As you might recall, Ohtani won his third MVP last season. He finished with a 180 wRC+ for the second season in row, while also becoming the founding member of the 50/50 Club, with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases. If we lower our minimum to 400 PA, we’ll find that the 2025 version of Ohtani has dropped to the seventh-best OPS of all time, but the 2024 version has jumped onto the list in second place, just five points of OPS and one point of sOPS+ behind Betts’ 2018 season. In other words, it would be perfectly fair to say that Shohei Ohtani is putting up one of the greatest seasons of all time for a leadoff batter, but also that he was an even better leadoff hitter last year.

The second fun fact is that Ohtani isn’t necessarily worse this season. You could argue that he’s just been a little less fortunate. I realize that it sounds bizarre to describe the second-best hitter in the game, who is closing in on his fourth MVP in five years, as unlucky, but Ohtani’s .311 BABIP is his worst mark since 2021. His .438 xwOBA is just four points off the career high he posted last season, but his .415 wOBA this year is 16 points below his 2024 wOBA. That .023 gap between his wOBA and xwOBA this season is the largest of his career (aside from the short 2020 season). I’m not saying Ohtani’s lack of luck is solely responsible for this ever-so-slight dip in production; he’s not hitting the ball quite as hard as he did last year, and he’s not putting it in the air quite as often. Still, xwOBA thinks he’s pretty much exactly as good as he was last year, just with worse results. We’re absolutely splitting hairs here, but Baseball Prospectus’ Deserved Runs Created Plus thinks he’s been even better, giving him a career-high 185 mark, compared to 176 last year. It’s safe to say that Ohtani is in the midst of the best two-season stretch as a leadoff hitter in baseball history.

The last fact is the most fun: As good as Ohtani has been as a leadoff hitter, he’s been even more generous to opposing leadoff batters. I told you that he has a 1.010 OPS and a 165 sOPS+ from the leadoff spot. Well, he’s faced 23 leadoff batters so far this season, and they’ve hit for a combined 1.071 OPS and 182 sOPS+. They’re destroying him. They’re batting .409 and touching him up for a 6.23 ERA. Small sample size or not, he’s turned opposing leadoff hitters into a batter who’s better than Shohei Ohtani, and that’s only barely a thing.