Shohei Ohtani in making his first postseason pitching start on Saturday night will make MLB history in a new way. The two-way superstar in Game 1 against the Phillies is the first starting pitcher in postseason history to bat higher than sixth in a game.
Ohtani bats leadoff in Game 1, as he has in each of his previous 51 starts and in now 151 of his 161 starts this year, including the postseason. That’s normal for Ohtani, helped by the two-way-player rule adopted by MLB in 2022 that allows two-way players
to start at both designated hitter and pitcher, so that when they leave the game as a pitcher, they can remain in the lineup as a hitter.
But it’s not normal in postseason history.
Four times in the 2015 postseason — Kyle Hendricks and Jason Hammel twice each — the Joe Maddon-era Cubs batted a starting pitcher eighth, and Zack Greinke did so once for the Houston Astros during the 2021 World Series.
The only other time a starting pitcher batted anywhere higher than ninth in the postseason was Babe Ruth, who hit sixth for the Boston Red Sox in Game 4 of the 1918 World Series.
Now, Ohtani bats first in Game 1 of the NLDS for the Dodgers. It’s not the first time he’s been linked to Ruth.
In 2021 with the Angels, Ohtani made 14 pitching starts while also holding at least a share of the major league home run lead, the first pitcher to make multiple such starts in a season since Ruth in 1919.
In 2023, Ohtani became the second player in AL/NL history to amass 500 career pitching strikeouts and hit 100 home runs, at least according to Elias Sports Bureau (they credit Ruth with 501 strikeouts, while Baseball Reference has 488). To date in the regular season, Ohtani has 280 home runs and 670 strikeouts.
But Ruth essentially had two careers, doing the vast majority of his pitching prior to committing full-time to hitting. Ohtani had three full seasons of two-way stardom with the Angels from 2021-23, and this year is his first year pitching and hitting with the Dodgers, after a gradual rehab from September 2023 elbow surgery. Now, he’s unleashed on the mound again.
The closest the two Ruths converged was for two years with the Red Sox. In 1918, in which he hit 29 home runs and struck out 40 batters as a pitcher, then followed that up with 54 home runs in 1919 and 30 strikeouts as a pitcher. Ohtani this season hit 55 home runs and struck out 62 batters, pointed out by Sarah Langs at MLB.com as the first major league player ever with 50 of each in the same season.
