El líder de los Dodgers rechaza una propuesta de contrato nueva.
Shohei Ohtani’s two-way performance has been so impressive to baseball fans over the past five years that drawing comparisons to Babe Ruth feels terribly insufficient. But as of right now, an entirely different kind of adjective may be used to characterize the Dodgers DH: underestimated.
We can understand if you find that absurd. Ultimately, how can one characterize a guy who has won two MVP awards, holds the highest contract in sports history, was dominating a season that left us wondering if it was the best ever, and is just one of the world’s most well-known sportsmen as underrated?
Nevertheless, Ohtani is only enjoying his finest hitting season and is presently recuperating from elbow surgery. He didn’t just carry over his form from the previous year. He has increased it.
Ohtani is hitting currently after going 1-for-2 with two walks and a home run in Los Angeles’ 4-0 victory over the White Sox on Wednesday, marking a franchise-record 10 straight games with an RBI.322/.402/.643, up from 184 last year and good for a career-best 194 OPS+. Against some of the worst pitchers in the game, to be fair, he has homered in five of his previous six games and six of his past eight. The daily injury report still has him on it.
Ohtani’s strikeout rate has decreased from 24% to 20% but his hard-hit percentage has increased from 54% to 61%. With three games remaining in June, he is probably going to have his second-best month ever. With a 476-foot home run (yes, with the advantage of being hit at Coors Field) he owns the longest home run hit by anyone this season. Having amassed 25 home runs and 16 steals in 82 team games, he has a decent chance of being the first player to ever have a 50/30 season.
In fact, Ohtani has been so dominant this month that he’s continuously finding ways to top new leaderboards. With three games remaining in June, all against San Francisco this coming weekend, Ohtani currently has a 68% hard-hit rate, meaning that 46 of the 68 balls he has hit this season have been classified as “hard-hit.” Over the course of Statcast’s ten years, there have been countless hitter months in which a batter has made contact with fifty batted balls. Right now, Ohtani’s June is tied for the fourth-best hard-hit month in history, with three better months—one of which is an Ohtani month.
Top months for hard hits, prior to 2015 (at least 50 batted balls)
74%; Aaron Judge, 2024 May
69% // June 2021, Shohei Ohtani
August 2015; Ryan Zimmerman, 69%
68% // Matt Olson, July 2023 → 68% // Shohei Ohtani, June 2024
68%; Kyle Schwarber, 2022 August
Ohtani stated, “My strategy is really to swing at strikes and just make sure that my posture and everything else is lined up.”
As easy as it seems, putting it into practice isn’t too difficult. He was in a mini-slump for two weeks as May turned into June, hitting just.188 with a.563 OPS from May 22 to June 9. Over the course of a long season, even the best hitters experience ups and downs, but as you can see, there was a strong correlation between those swings and a momentary tendency to start fishing outside the zone (red line). His OPS also returned to normal when that did (blue line).
