SI

Shohei Ohtani Absolutely Obliterated a Baseball

Ohtani's blast was the hardest-hit homer of his career.

Kyle Koster

Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports
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Shohei Ohtani hit the 117th home run of his Major League Baseball career Tuesday night and it exited his bat with more velocity than any of the previous ones. The ninth-inning solo shot gave the Los Angeles Dodgers an insurance run against the Washington Nationals and wasted absolutely no time traveling from home plate to a seatback 450 feet away. StatCast clocked the blast at 118.7 mph, which is 2 mph faster than any other ball that's been hit this season.

For the non-numbers nerds, it also looked really cool.

Ohtani hit the ball so hard that the official Major League Baseball X account had no choice but to use an emoji. That's how you know it was a shot of some significance.

The dual-threat superstar has been as advertised during his first month with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He's slashing .364/.430/.677 and the laser-beam roundtripper was his sixth of the young season. It's entirely possible that being able to focus on hitting all season will yield significant improvement. And he's doing all of this against quite a complicated backdrop off the field, which figures to be less of an issue as time goes on. Which would be bad news for future baseballs.

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Kyle Koster
KYLE KOSTER

Kyle Koster is an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated covering the intersection of sports and media. He was formerly the editor in chief of The Big Lead, where he worked from 2011 to '24. Koster also did turns at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he created the Sports Pros(e) blog, and at Woven Digital.

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