Don’t let anyone ever try to claim that Shohei Ohtani isn’t at least the best baseball player of his generation. Maybe several others, too.
He has now won four Most Valuable Player awards in five seasons, two in the American League with the Angels and the last two in the National League with the Dodgers. And all four times, with an electorate made up of two Baseball Writers’ Association of America members from each league city but a panel that changes from year to year, the vote was unanimous.
If that’s not a consensus, I’m not sure what is.
There were only seven holdover voters on the National League voting panel from 2024 to ’25: David O’Brien of The Athletic, Bob Nightengale of USA Today, Thomas Harding and Alex Stumpf of MLB.com, Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post, Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Derrick Gould of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That means that 46 other voters between last year and this one – this year including this publication’s Bill Plunkett – came to the same conclusion, the same one that American League voters reached in 2021 and ’23.
Any other award, I’d suggest naming it after him. Then again, Shohei still has some catching up to do. Barry Bonds won seven MVPs. From a volume standpoint, no one else in the game’s history is close.
(And in case you’re wondering, the MVP award as we know it now, selected by members of the BBWAA, was instituted in 1931. Before that, various Most Valuable Player or Player of the Year honors were awarded by outside entities. Hard as it is to believe, Babe Ruth only won the equivalent award once, in 1923.)
This season, of course, cemented Ohtani’s one-of-a-kind status. From June on he was again a pitcher as well as a hitter, and if we’re judging a player by his value – you know, the part of Most Valuable Player that sometimes gets overlooked as we fervently crunch the numbers – how can you not give extra consideration to the guy who pitches and hits and does both at a high level?
OK, OK, consider the numbers: As a hitter, he broke his own franchise record with 55 home runs and added 102 RBIs, 146 runs scored, a 1.014 OPS and a 179 OPS+, a stat where 100 is league average. Each of those last three led the league, as did his 380 total bases.
Plus 20 stolen bases, in a year when he didn’t run nearly as much as he did during his historic 50/50 season in 2024, largely because of those demands as a pitcher.
Plus a 2.87 ERA in 14 starts, with 62 strikeouts in 47 innings, as the Dodgers ramped him up oh, so slowly coming off a second major elbow surgery. He didn’t complete five innings until the end of August, but his final four starts were a sneak peek at the possibilities: 19⅔ innings, 10 hits allowed, one earned run, 27 strikeouts.
And then there was his most impressive feat, which took place after all of the ballots had been turned in, that six-inning, 10-strikeout pitching outing with three home runs – including one that sailed over the right field pavilion and traveled 469 feet – in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series against Milwaukee. It had no bearing on the balloting – this is a regular-season award, remember – but it helped illustrate why he should and would be a unanimous pick, again.
Just imagine him as a full member of the rotation from the start of the season in 2026, as well as a full-time DH. And considering that there still has not been a flood of others reaching this level as combination hitters/pitchers, you have to wonder if we’ll ever see his like again.
“I do plan on being able to pitch off the mound from the beginning of the season,” Ohtani said, through interpreter Matt Hidaka, on a media conference call after Thursday’s announcement. “For me, the biggest thing is to be able to stay healthy throughout the season and hopefully be able to start and end the season on the mound.”
You can interpret “value” in another sense, too.
That $680 million in deferred money on his 10-year contract – you know, the one the chattering class loves to gripe about while forgetting that Ohtani and agent Nez Balelo offered the same deal to other teams, including the Angels – is easily made up in part by the advertising partnerships the Dodgers have established in Japan because of Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki. (And who knows? Maybe there are more to come.)
We go back to something Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said in the wake of that 18-inning Game 3 of the World Series against Toronto, the night when Ohtani doubled twice and homered twice in his first four at-bats and then was walked five times, four intentionally and the fifth of which might as well have been intentional, three balls in the dirt and a fourth that was wide with two outs in the 17th.
Roberts, who was a teammate of Bonds in San Francisco, was reminded that this was the sort of treatment Barry received in his prime and was asked if Ohtani had reached that level of production.
“I think it’s all relative,” Roberts said. “Barry’s the greatest hitter I’ve ever seen, but this day and age there’s just (Ohtani) or maybe Judge. But, yeah, I think that we’re just fortunate we have Mookie (Betts) and Freddie (Freeman) behind him. But you just don’t see that type of behavior from opposing managers, and that’s just the ultimate sign of respect.”
One way to look at it: Ohtani already has two more rings in his eight seasons than Bonds wound up with in his 22 – and, as Ohtani noted, “My goal is to, again, win another World Series.” You think he doesn’t feel liberated, being with an organization where that’s a reasonable goal every year?
And who says he can’t catch or pass Barry in MVP awards before this is all over?
jalexander@scng.com
