The Face You Make When Shohei Ohtani Hits a Homer 120 Miles per Hour

On Tuesday night, Shohei Ohtani hit the second-hardest pull-side home run by a left-handed batter at PNC Park this season. If that doesn’t sound like it could make your head explode, well, that’s the point. I picked the most boring way to tell the story.

Anyone who saw this particular home run knows that a more accurate representation of the experience would be this: On Tuesday night, Shohei Ohtani hit the hardest ball of his entire career, turning around a 99-mph Bubba Chandler fastball on the inside corner and launching a 120-mph missile that skimmed over the Pittsburgh turf and triggered a series of small explosions as it crashed into the right field bleachers. It was the third-hardest-hit ball of the entire 2025 season, and the sixth-hardest home run in the 10-year history of the Statcast era.

Anyone who saw this particular home run knows know that it was powerful enough to detonate a cranium, or least powerful enough to make a face do this:

That’s Alex Freeland, and if this picture is any indication, bearing witness to Ohtani’s home run forced him to reevaluate his relationship with reality. That’s how I’d like to tell the story of this home run, through the facial expressions of the people who witnessed it. The story of Ohtani’s home run is one of awe, disbelief, and fear, all of which were depicted on faces around the ballpark. In case you missed it, here’s a video of the home run in question:

That’s not a bad pitch. Chandler probably wanted it a bit higher, but it’s 99 mph right on the inside corner and not that far from the bottom of the zone either. You could certainly do worse against a big left-handed slugger who does most of his damage on pitches out over the plate.

Let’s start with the people who were closest to it. Ohtani’s face is inscrutable. It remained inscrutable as he jogged around the bases, high-fived and high-fived his teammates. Understandably, he may have been the only person in the entire stadium who didn’t seem remotely surprised that he’d just hit a ball 120 mph. That’s just another day at the office for Shohei Ohtani:

Both home plate umpire Nic Lentz and catcher Henry Davis track the ball with their eyes, but you have to zoom in to really make out their facial expressions. Lentz’s eyes are open wide with wonder. Davis’ are narrower. He’s chagrined. He’s tracking the ball, but he’s looking into the middle distance. This is the expression of a man who has spent his entire professional career in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization.

The face I really love belongs to the fan to Ohtani’s left. The camera cuts off four-fifths of his head, leaving only his bottom lip, which is attached to his jaw, which is in the process of dropping. It looks like the blast blew the top off his head, as if Ohtani rendered him infinitely agape:

Because masks cover the jaws of both Lentz and Davis, it’s fun to pretend that their mouths are doing the exact same thing underneath all the padding.

We also got a side view of the homer. In the still below, taken as Ohtani finishes his follow-through and tracks the ball, I count one photographer and 41 fans of whom we can see enough to determine what they’re paying attention to. Nineteen of them, or 46%, are on their phones, but nearly all of them are paying attention. Fifteen of them (two largely obscured by Ohtani) are filming his at-bat in case something spectacular happens. Two are texting, and two are huddled over a phone trying to read something or make out an image. I’m sure the fans who are filming will come away with great footage, but at this point in time, just eight of them are actually following the ball, either with their eyes or their phone. The other seven are still staring at their phones and haven’t registered what’s happening yet. They haven’t reacted at all. You could argue that they missed it:

As you might expect, the fans directly behind the plate much are less interested. These are the fanciest seats for the fanciest people, but not necessarily the biggest baseball fans. (The fan-iest people? No, that’s definitely not it.) We’ll zoom closer in a moment, but the shot below shows the two priciest sections in the entire ballpark, and as Ohtani follows through, only three people in this entire picture have reacted. Can you spot them?

One is the fan I pointed out earlier, sitting right behind Ohtani and to his left, whose head is in the process of flying off. The other two are Dodgers fans in the third-to-last row, just to the right of the stairs, and they are absolutely agog:

Literally no one else in their section has reacted at all. Few of them have even turned their heads in the direction of the ball yet, but this couple is already aghast. You can practically hear the “Ohhhhhh” that is escaping them both in unison. Because he’s on the aisle, you can see that the man all the way to the left has his right fist clenched tightly. This is what baseball fans look like.

If we take that first image and zoom all the way out so we can get two more sections in frame, we’ll find three more fans who are paying enough attention to be blown away by Ohtani’s blast. All three of these kids appear to be at saying the word “Whoa” at their own pace:

And that’s it. In the most zoomed-out version of this still frame, I counted 108 fans. As the game’s biggest star obliterated a 99-mph fastball from the home team’s top prospect, launching one of the most powerful home runs anyone has ever seen, just under 6.5% of the fans in the best seats in the house reacted. A couple more would react by the time the camera cut away and Ohtani left the batter’s box to start circling the bases, but we’re still comfortably under 10% here. Abolish these cushy seats and give them back to the people.

We’ll focus on two more people who didn’t react at all, but they’ve got a pretty good excuse. As the high camera in the right field corner tracked the ball, we got quick pans across the entire outfield. They showed the reactions of all three outfielders. The right fielder took a couple steps because the ball was hit as such a low angle that it seemed like there was a chance it might bounce off the top of the wall, and when it’s hit right at you like that, it can be a bit hard to read. But the left and center fielders knew better. As soon as Ohtani swung, they slumped from ready position into a slouch. They never took a step:

The story was very different in the right field stands, where a lot of things happened very quickly. Earlier, I mentioned a series of explosions. I was exaggerating, but not by as much as you might think. The first was subtle. Ohtani hit this ball so hard and at such a low angle that it made it to the right field seats in no time. In the still below, the ball has just landed. You can’t see it, but try to figure out where it is. You have to follow the eyes:

Maybe it would help if I connected some dots for you:

Everyone on the outside of the frame is leaning in toward that one spot, but everybody near this spot is leaning away from it. Literally no one tried to catch this ball in the air. They were too terrified. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before. A wave swept through the fans nearest the epicenter, pushing them away. I count 12 people leaning away from the baseball; I’d classify six of them as cowering in fear, and I see one person fully in the fetal position:

One of the cowerers has more right than the others. The woman in the very middle of the frame, wearing a black Betty Boop t-shirt and screaming in terror, reaches out to block the ball with her left hand. It seems to hit the space right between her and her neighbor in the orange UVA trucker hat, then bounces off her outstretched hand and settles right at her feet. As soon as the ball lands, however, the fear is gone. Everybody wants it. It’s no longer a deadly projectile. It’s a souvenir. The wave sweeps back in toward the epicenter like an explosion so powerful that it forced all the air out of the blast zone, and the air is now rushing back in to fill the vacuum:

On the left, a fan in the front row wearing a number a no. 30 Pirates jersey with “BEER” on the back – selecting Seth Beer in the minor league phase of the Rule 5 draft really is the gift that keeps on giving – sees his opportunity. Between the Beer jersey and an Ohtani home run ball, he’ll never have to pay for a drink again. He sprints past his neighbor, also cowering, and gives her whole new reason to recoil. He smashes her very full beer can with his hand, hard. First it splashes everyone in the vicinity, then it erupts, sending up a sustained three-foot tall geyser of suds:

The guy is way too late. The woman in the Betty Boop shirt reaches down, and although she gets a face full of beer and her sunglasses fall from the top of her head onto her nose, she picks it up easily. “I saw it coming right at me,” she seems to say as everyone wipes the beer off themselves. “Holy shit,” says the woman three seats to her right. One man spies a chance to get on TV. He runs over from 25 feet away, plants himself in front of the bearer of the ball and waves his arms back and forth. He is now officially famous:

In the dugout, the Dodgers are looking expectantly at the scoreboard, waiting for the exit velocity to appear. Enrique Hernández spots the number first. He smiles and points for the benefit of Dalton Rushing, who whips his head around too. The number forces a grimace from Blake Snell, which makes him look 10% more Blake Snell than usual. Tyler Glasnow appears to utter his own “Holy shit.” Somewhere in the back of the dugout, Alex Freeland starts to wonder whether anything is real:

Rushing can’t contain himself. He smacks his hands to his face like Kevin McCallister. He turns first to the neighbor on his left then the neighbor on his right. “One-twenty!” he exclaims in each direction:

As Ohtani collects his high fives, Dodgers assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness raises his hands to his shoulder to mime firing a bazooka:

The final face belongs to poor Bubba Chandler. As he walks around the mound to collect himself, he sneaks a peek at the exit velocity too. He closes his eyes and puffs out his cheeks. You can almost hear him thinking, “I didn’t have to deal with this back in Triple-A.”