Larger than life

The 2025 Major League Baseball playoffs have seen developments and trends that seem to defy the events of the regular season.

On the one hand, this is always the case. It's the beauty of the randomness and chaos and unlikely heroes of October baseball. Even when the best teams triumph, the road to get there is rarely predictable.

On the other hand, some of the strategies within the games feel especially disconnected from the way baseball is played in 2025.

Managers are riding their starters deep into games, including an honest-to-goodness complete game in the National League Championship Series. Batters are even bunting again. As ever, we are getting reminders that baseball's trends ebb and flow, oftentimes in a circle, even as certain changes to the modern game feel permanent.

When it comes to the shift away from parades of relief pitchers and back towards workhorse starting pitchers, that reinstates some of the best narratives of this time of year. It brings back some of the best stories when it comes to the heroes that carry their teams in October.

And in the case of these playoffs, this shift laid the groundwork for us to witness another incredible, once-in-a-lifetime performance from Shohei Ohtani.

Today

• Another night when Shohei stood alone among the giants of MLB history
• Will the tides with starting pitchers actually turn?
• Checking in with my fellow old guys

All-time game from an all-time player

We're actually talking about more than 100 years when we talk about the grandest and rarest accomplishments in baseball history. It's a lot of baseball and a lot of greatest players when we can actually say that the thing we are watching is among the best in all of that history.

What Shohei Ohtani did in game 4 of the NLCS is certainly among the greatest individual performances in postseason history. Depending on how you want to judge it, Ohtani might have the case for the best postseason game ever. He might have played the best game ever, period.

Ohtani was the starting pitcher and the designated hitter for the Dodgers. He threw six shutout innings and struck out 10 Brewers. If it weren't for some walks, I don't imagine Milwaukee would have had much of anything with baserunners. From his high-90s fastball to his cartoonish sweepers and splitters, everything looked unhittable. And he did it for six innings, which might have felt unlikely as recently as last month in this era of short starts.

At the plate, Ohtani hit three home runs. Knowing that not all round-trippers are created equal, I should note that at least one of those shots was of the storybook variety, the kind people will be talking about for a long time. Check out the highlight of his second home run in this video: he hit it out of the stadium entirely.

After his third home run of the night, play-by-play announcer Brian Anderson put it well: "This is an all-time game from an all-time player." I also think he might have described Ohtani as "larger than life." That's the description that continues to come to mind for me, especially in these moments when he stands out as a singular figure in all of baseball history.

On Friday night, Ohtani delivered a dominant game on the mound and at the plate against the team that had the best team in the National League to send his team to their second consecutive World Series. For anyone watching, it will be a game they never forget. And it will be the kind of game people talk about for a long, long time.

Like the dodo

For the second time in this edition, let me share a line from announcer Brian Anderson that caught my attention.

The Dodgers are on the way to the World Series once again despite a truly bad bullpen. To counter that issue, manager Dave Roberts has been riding his starting pitchers more than is the fashion these days and certainly more than one year ago when every Dodgers playoff game was a bullpen game.

Those starters have responded. One day after Blake Snell threw eight innings in an LA victory, Yoshinobu Yamamoto threw a complete game to give his team a 2-0 series lead. As Yamamoto approached the end of that gem, Anderson said that complete games in 2025 seemed like a thing of the past, much "like the dodo."

I think the pendulum is going to swing back towards deeper outings by starting pitchers. But in the meantime, I'm glad the many years of bullpen parades gave Anderson the opening to lean on the idiom about things "going the way of the dodo."

Maybe sacrifice bunts will be the next thing to re-emerge when we thought they had gone the way of the dodo.

Checking in with the old guys

I'm happy to say that the rest of the sports world caught up with one of my beats this week: the 40-plus guys who are still getting it done.

Did I appreciate the "senior moment" headline for the graphic on Fox? Reader, I did not. But I would like to think that the shared interest in Max Scherzer, Joe Flacco, and Aaron Rodgers was born of the sentiment I have shared here: people approaching age 40 and clinging to the players who are still older than us.

If we want to continue with the thread of starting pitchers and the narratives of longer outings, I really enjoyed Scherzer's start to give the Blue Jays a big win in the ALCS. He doesn't have dominate stuff anymore. Mad Max can come up with a big-time pitch here and there, but he needs to get a lot more outs with location and savvy.

In his first start in weeks, Scherzer did just that. He located his fastball, he set batters up, and he got swings and misses with a pitch he isn't known for. As the Mariners kept whiffing at big, loopy curveballs, it was clear that the old guy still had something in the tank. At least he did for one night.

I was rooting for a Scherzer postseason start back in September. I don't know how many more of these I'll get before all of these world class athletes are younger than me, so I certainly enjoyed watching my fellow old guy this week.

It was funny that Flacco beat Rodgers, too. Wins all around.

Odds and ends

• Scherzer had his moment for the Blue Jays earlier in the week, but it's the Seattle Mariners who are on the brink of reaching their first World Series. Isabelle Minasian writes about the fans who are hoping against hope that their team will finally win the pennant (Lookout Landing).
• There are always the nuances and difficulties of comparing across eras, but I really think Shohei Ohtani played the best game ever to send the Dodgers to the World Series. Mike Axisa looks at some of the other greatest-of-all-time showings (CBS Sports).
• Hey, look at this. Tom Ley agrees with me, as indicated by the title of this blog: Shohei Ohtani Plays The Greatest Baseball Game Of All Time (Defector).

Where else could I end this entry? Let's repeat a highlight that's included above, but let's just focus on that second home run that Ohtani hit. This is like nothing I have ever seen.

Happy Sunday.