Shohei Ohtani has won four league MLB MVP awards, is a back-to-back World Series champion, and arguably had the greatest baseball game of all time last season in the postseason against the Milwaukee Brewers.
But there’s one thing left that he wants in his collection as he leads the Los Angeles Dodgers to a possible historic three-peat: a Cy Young award.
While that would have been impossible with the workload he had last season, coming off an arm injury, Dave Roberts showed on Tuesday that Ohtani’s aspirations for the National League Cy Young aren’t in jest.
Ohtani threw six innings, allowed only a single hit with no runs, and had six strikeouts against the Cleveland Guardians.
Throughout the night, Ohtani’s arsenal of pitches bewildered the Guardians players, as Cleveland had little to no shot against most of the Japanese star’s pitches when he was in his control groove.
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And on his final pitch of the night against Rhys Hoskins, he sent a message to the rest of the National League: that Pitcher Ohtani is fully operational, and he might be even scarier than Batter Ohtani.
Ohtani threw a sweeper on a rainy night in L.A. that brought Hoskins down to his knees trying to reach the ball.
The Dodgers would go on to win the game 4-1 to raise their record to the same scoreline through the first few days of the 2026 MLB season.
L.A. will accomplish a record on Wednesday when Yoshinobu Yamaoto takes the mound, making it the first time three Japanese pitchers all started the same series for a respective team. Ohtani and Yamamoto’s junior, Roki Sasaki, lost on Monday but put on a strong performance, only allowing a single run on four hits.
