Everyone who played baseball growing up remembers that one kid from their little league, the one who was just a bit bigger and stronger and faster than everyone else, the one who could do everything better than you could, the one whose team almost always won because they had the one player who was playing baseball at an entirely different level than the entire rest of the league.
In Major League Baseball, that kid is Shohei Ohtani.
The Los Angeles Dodgers' two-way superstar, who does the unthinkable night after night, took the entire sport of baseball and turned it on its head on Friday night.
Ohtani, with the Dodgers needing a win to go to the World Series, started on the mound and struck out the side in the top of the first.
In the bottom of the first, he led off with a home run.
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Ohtani went on to throw six innings, allowing two hits and three walks while striking out 10. And at the plate, he hit three home runs.
It very well might just be the greatest game ever played in the history of baseball.
That's one of those sentences that feels at first like hyperbole, but think about it. How is someone topping this?
There have been four homer games, sure, but those never contained six shutout pitching innings with 10 strikeouts.
And sure, pitchers have had even shinier gems, but they never hit three home runs in such a game.
You can add in the stakes here, that it was NCLS Game 4 and the Dodgers had already jumped out to a 3-0 series lead and had a chance to close out an emphatic victory.
Aside from a World Series game, there's no stage Ohtani could've performed on that would've been brighter.
And when these lights shone upon Ohtani, he reflected their brightness back out into the world.
There has never been anyone like Ohtani, and there never will be again.
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