Shohei Ohtani Just Had the Best Playoff Game in Major League History

Shohei Ohtani had quite a night, didn’t he?

Let’s be more direct: Ohtani just had the greatest individual game in postseason history. On the mound, he threw six scoreless innings, allowing two hits and three walks while striking out 10. He got pulled after giving up two straight baserunners to start the seventh, which kind of mucked up his line, which is ironic, because that’s what the Dodgers offense has been doing to other starting pitchers over the past two weeks.

At the plate: 3-for-3 with a walk. All of those hits were solo home runs: 116.5 mph off the bat and 446 feet in the first, 116.9 mph and 469 feet in the fourth, 113.6 mph and 427 feet to center in the seventh. That second one, man, what a tank.

This is the perfect distillation of the value proposition for Ohtani. Given that this win, 5-1 over the Brewers in NLCS Game 4, clinched the pennant for the Dodgers, either one of those performances would’ve been memorable-bordering-on-legendary for Dodger fans. Put together? Well, after that fourth-inning home run, I started asking that question from a couple paragraphs back: Was this the best game in playoff history?

Obviously, that’s only a real question by certain definitions of “best.” Was this as good as Don Larsen’s World Series perfect game? Jack Morris’ 10-inning shutout to win the 1991 World Series? Reggie Jackson’s three-homer game to win the 1977 World Series? No, insofar as Ohtani’s night of nights doesn’t guarantee a championship. But let’s use a more favorable definition: taking the game in isolation (using championship win probability as a tiebreaker at best) and giving extra credit to players who contribute on both sides of the ball.

Ohtani is the first starting pitcher to homer twice in a playoff game, but contrary to how he gets talked about, he’s not the first pitcher to ever pick up a bat. His 12 total bases at the plate are a new record for a starting pitcher in a playoff game, but 19 starting pitchers before him had homered once in a playoff game (Bob Gibson and Dave McNally did it twice each), and 25 starting pitchers (including Gibson and McNally) had recorded at least four total bases in a playoff game.

I guess I’ll pull back the curtain on the editorial process here. I started writing in the bottom of the fifth inning. That last paragraph is as far as I got before Ohtani homered for a third time, rendering moot the question I’d set out to answer. Yes, this pretty much has to be the best individual performance in postseason history, unless championship leverage means everything.

Let’s see who else was in the conversation until now.

Dutch Ruether held the previous record for total bases by a starting pitcher with seven, and he did it in a game where he threw a 91-pitch complete game and allowed only a single unearned run. That’s pretty impressive, even by Ohtani’s standards. Unfortunately, the world learned a year later that this game took place under, let’s say, “complicated” circumstances, which takes some of the shine off it.

Jesse Haines actually got the complete-game shutout, against the Murderer’s Row Yankees, no less, though with somewhat less overpowering stuff than Ohtani. Still, he gets extra points for degree of difficulty. Here’s a fun bit of trivia: The opposing starting pitcher, the guy Haines took deep? Dutch Ruether!

You could talk me into this one being almost as good Ohtani’s, just because Orel Hershiser had a modern strikeout total against a tougher opponent in the World Series, and also didn’t make an out at the plate. We don’t expect aces to go the distance anymore, but Ohtani did leave traffic on the bases after only six innings, and a less snakebit offense than Milwaukee’s would’ve scuffed up Ohtani’s run of zeroes.

I had never heard of Marius Russo before tonight, but he reached base three times while allowing only one unearned run in a World Series complete game. It is worth mentioning that while the 1943 Cardinals did have Stan Musial, Marty Marion, and Harry Walker, this was during World War II, when many of the best big leaguers were at war.

Before tonight, I probably would’ve singled this game out as the best two-way performance in playoff history. This is the iconic game for the iconic big-game pitcher of the mid-20th Century. Gibson threw a complete game, as was his custom; he was lifted for a reliever after eight innings in his first career playoff start, then finished the last eight postseason starts of his career, all in the World Series. Until his final outing, Game 7 of the 1968 World Series against the Tigers, he also won every start he made.

On this occasion, Gibson, who’d allowed one run and struck out 10 in Game 1 and threw a shutout in Game 4, was not quite his best on the mound. This time, he gave up a shocking two runs. But he got one of them back with a fifth-inning dinger off Jim Lonborg.

I think the fact that this was Game 7 of the World Series gives Gibson’s start a little more heft, despite my earlier protestations about context. So does the fact that his home run came against that year’s AL Cy Young winner. But Gibson also let in two runs and made three outs at the plate, while Ohtani made zero outs and allowed zero runs.

I think a diplomatic way to compare these two games, allowing for era and context, is to describe Ohtani’s Game 4 of the 2025 NLCS as the Millennial version of Gibson’s Game 7 of the 1967 World Series. The latter being, again, one of the most legendary individual games in baseball history, if not in the history of North American sport.

How good was Ohtani tonight? That good.