On Friday night at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, fans witnessed perhaps the greatest game by a player in the history of baseball, and one of the handful of greatest individual performances in any sport ever. But Shohei Ohtani’s performance shouldn’t be of interest just to sports fans. His triumph offers all of us a ray of hope at a troubled time.
Ohtani, the most talented baseball player in history, put on a show for the ages. Facing the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series, looking to clinch a berth in the World Series for the Dodgers, Ohtani threw a two-hit, 10-strike-out gem over six-plus scoreless innings. He also hit three monstrous home runs, which together traveled more than 1,300 feet, including one towering blast that cleared Dodger Stadium. (He is only the seventh player in history to hit it out of that park, and now he has hit eight home runs of at least 450 feet.) You may never again in your life see a ball hit that far, that majestically.
The moment Ohtani made contact with the ball, William Contreras, the Brewers catcher, turned away. The pitcher, Chad Patrick, looked down at the ground, not even bothering to turn around. Dodgers players, meanwhile, looked on with disbelief, jaws agape, some holding their head with their hands. Everyone knew they were witnessing something special.
“He just blows all our imaginations out of the water,” Mookie Betts, the shortstop for the Dodgers, said after the game. It’s easy to understand why. In the history of Major League Baseball, there have been plenty of elite pitchers and hitters. But only two players have been this good at both ends of the game. Babe Ruth was one. Shohei Ohtani is the other.
In the first inning, Ohtani struck out three Brewers and then, exchanging his glove and cap for a bat and helmet, became the first pitcher in regular- or post-season history to hit a lead-off home run. Ohtani is also the first pitcher in history with multiple home runs in a post-season game. He’s only the 13th player in history to have a three-homer game in the playoffs. (Just two previous starting pitchers have even hit two post-season home runs in their careers: Bob Gibson and Dave McNally.) And he’s the only player in the history of baseball, regular season or post-season, to have a 10-strike-out, three-home-run game.
Ohtani has had previous brushes with greatness. In 2023, he compiled one of the greatest seasons in history. In 2024, he went 6-for-6 with three homers and 10 RBIs in a single game, and in the process became the first player to hit 50 or more homers and steal 50 or more bases in a single season.
But none of that equals what he did on Friday night. Jayson Stark, who has covered baseball for more than 30 years, put it this way: “A man named Ohtani had the single greatest game any human has ever had on a baseball field.”
Ohtani, born in Oshu, Japan, in 1994, was already a legendary figure in Japan by the time he arrived in the Major Leagues in 2018. He was recognized as the best pitcher and best hitter in Nippon Professional Baseball; in 2016 Ohtani literally hit a ball through the roof of the Tokyo Dome. Ohtani spent six seasons with the Los Angeles Angels, where he was Rookie of the Year and became the first player to be twice selected MVP of the American League by unanimous vote. He signed with Los Angeles in 2024, where he won the National League MVP by a unanimous vote in 2024, becoming only the second player to earn the honor in both leagues. By the time he was 30, Ohtani had already separated himself from the other elite players in the game. And now he’s gone a step beyond.
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE recognized the virtues of sports since the ancient Greeks, who believed in the harmony of mind and body. They saw sports as a component of human flourishing. Athletic competition was also an arena in which people could display arete, or human excellence. Athletic excellence requires not just natural talent but also discipline and determination, hard work and study, resilience and focus, and the willingness to fight through pain and fatigue. Sporting competition at its best creates a deep bond among teammates, even as it fosters respect for competitors.
“Because sport is gratuitous,” the ethicist Leon Kass once observed, “it is a field of grace: the gracious display of beautiful form, the gracious appreciation of worthy opponents, gratitude for native gifts and efforts rewarded.” He added, “The fascination of sport lies in the moment of truth, when some rise and some fall, some perform and some choke. Here in microcosm, the human drama is on display, with all its pathos and possibility.”
Perhaps few fans would describe their attachment to sports in quite those terms. But Kass captures the way sports can stir powerful emotions. People in every culture understand intuitively that the drama of a game can encapsulate, in a compressed form, the drama of life. There’s a reason people of otherwise great equanimity can get so caught up in watching a game. That’s because, as crowd reactions demonstrate, athletic competition at the highest level has the capacity to inspire awe. And awe is what Shohei Ohtani inspired on an unforgettable Friday night in October.
There’s something else you should know about Ohtani. He is, to all appearances, a class act. In Japan, he is known as kanpeki no hito, “the perfect person,” because of his impeccable manners. He shows extraordinary respect for others, selflessness, and kindness to umpires—who report that Ohtani is the only hitter in Major League Baseball who says hello to them before every plate appearance. Even when he’s been asked to submit to checks for foreign substances to doctor the baseball, he’s done so with grace and a smile on his face. Ohtani, beloved by his teammates, is a cheerful and easy presence, quick to joke, professional but never distant. Not even a gambling scandal involving his longtime interpreter has significantly tarnished his image. (An investigation found Ohtani innocent of any wrongdoing.) He is as steady as they come.
When the former Miami Marlins outfielder Jeremy Hermida joined the Japanese team Ohtani was on in 2015, he said that baseball was Ohtani’s life. Ohtani quizzed Hermida about the culture of the Major Leagues, the stadiums, the lifestyle. And despite being relegated to a small nook of a locker room because of his young age, Ohtani seemed completely content.
“He just never complained,” Hermida told The New York Times. “Never nothing. He couldn’t have been more humble, more nice, smile on his face every day.”
The 1971 movie The Last Picture Show features a group of high schoolers coming of age in a bleak, isolated North Texas town that is dying both culturally and economically. Sam the Lion, who owns the local cinema, is thoughtful and wise, a man who protects the vulnerable. In one scene, Sam the Lion confronts a group of high schoolers that has harassed a mentally disabled young man, Billy, to whom Sam has become a guardian. “Now you boys can get on out of here,” Sam says. “I don’t want no more to do with you. Scaring a poor, unfortunate creature like Billy just so’s you can have a few laughs—I’ve been around that trashy behavior all my life. I’m getting tired of putting up with it.”
We live in an era of trashy behavior, of slipshod standards, of too much cruelty and too little decency filtering their way throughout society. Old men in politics promote hate and dehumanization while, as my colleague George Packer points out, young men in politics celebrate Hitler and joke about gas chambers and rape. We could use a few more Sam the Lions right about now.
The road back to esteeming arete means we have to look to such examples where we find them. So enjoy Shohei Ohtani while you can. He embodies athletic excellence, which will bring you joy, and moral excellence, which will bring you hope. We could benefit from some of both these days.
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