Dodgers move on to the NLCS after winning it in the 11th inning. The bases were loaded and the Phillies pitcher made an errant throw home on a grounder when he could have gone to first base easily. People say he panicked under pressure, I say he thought there was only one out.

Anarchistbear said:

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Was a great game. Sakaki was unhittable. Dodgers score on a bases loaded walk and an error. Think they win it all.

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Until further notice the Dodgers are the presumptive champions again. They didn't take the regular season very seriously but that roster is too loaded.

PAC-10-BEAR said:

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Dodgers move on to the NLCS after winning it in the 11th inning. The bases were loaded and the Phillies pitcher made an errant throw home on a grounder when he could have gone to first base easily. People say he panicked under pressure, I say he thought there was only one out.

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Losing track of the outs could also be part of panicking under pressure.

Bump. Dodgers win game 1 of NLCS at Milwaukee.

I did watch tonight. That was nuts!

Teoscar Hernandez seems like a good guy and had some big hits in the Phillies series but his defense and baserunning is sheet. He should have scored on that play.

Dang, that last Brewers batter should have taken one for the team.

Shohei Ohtani

3 homeruns, 10 strikeouts, 0 runs. Incredible.

Ohtani with the greatest individual performance in the history of the game

ChatGPT



With ohtani pitching and hitting….

We can easily compare batters to batters. And pitchers to pitchers.
But is there a metric that allows one to compare hitting to batting?

Like, tonight ohtani pitched 6 innings scoreless with 10 k's. And he also hit 3 hr.

If we added up the two sides of his game statistically it is probably the best performance ever.

Is there any way to statistically add it up and compare to others?
Like, how does this compare to a 5hr game? Or a perfect game? Statistically.

I don't know how to evaluate it.




That's a great question - and one that baseball statisticians have actually wrestled with since Shohei Ohtani burst onto the scene.

You've put your finger on the core issue: pitching and hitting stats are on totally different scales, so you can't directly "add" them. But there are a few ways analysts have tried to bridge that gap.

Let's unpack it carefully:



1. The problem
Hitting uses rate stats (AVG, OPS, wRC+, WAR as a hitter).
Pitching uses ERA, FIP, K/9, WAR as a pitcher, etc.
They measure performance in different currencies - runs created vs. runs prevented.

So to compare them, you need a common currency - like "runs above average" or "wins above replacement."



2. The best bridge: WAR (Wins Above Replacement)

WAR already translates both hitting and pitching into the same unit: how many wins a player adds to his team compared to a replacement-level player.

So, for a given game, you could estimate:
Ohtani's batting WAR for that game, plus
Ohtani's pitching WAR for that game.

Then you can sum them to get a total "impact."

It's not officially calculated per game by WAR databases, but we can approximate.



3. Let's estimate Ohtani's game tonight

Let's say he:
Pitched 6 innings, 0 runs, 10 strikeouts.
Hit 3 home runs.

We can use some rough WAR-to-performance conversions:

Pitching side:
A 6-inning, 10-K, 0-run game = roughly 0.5 WAR (sometimes 0.60.7).
That's about the same as a top-tier "quality start" or 1/5 of an elite pitcher's best month.

Hitting side:
A 3-HR game is insane.
Historically, most 3-HR games by position players are worth around 0.6 to 0.8 WAR depending on walks and other plate appearances.

Total estimate:
Ohtani's total game WAR 1.11.3 WAR in one game.



4. How does that compare historically?

Performance Type Approx. Single-Game WAR Rarity

Typical good game (2 hits, 1 run) 0.2 WAR Common

3-HR game 0.7 WAR Dozens per year
6 IP, 10K, 0 ER pitching 0.5 WAR A few per week

4-HR game 0.91.0 WAR ~20 ever

No-hitter 0.9 WAR Rare, a few per year

Perfect game 1.21.3 WAR Historic (24 ever)

Ohtani tonight (pitching + hitting) ~1.21.3 WAR Unprecedented

So - statistically speaking -
Ohtani's combined game would rank roughly equal to a perfect game or a 4-HR game, and arguably more impressive because it came from one person doing both jobs.



5. In short

If you want one metric:
Use WAR (Wins Above Replacement) it's the only stat that unifies offense and defense (and pitching).
For single games, look at single-game WAR (sgWAR) or Win Probability Added (WPA) if you want context-based impact.



6. For perspective

If a 3-HR game is "0.7 WAR" and a perfect game is "1.2 WAR,"
then Ohtani doing both in one night is about as statistically valuable as a perfect game and a 3-HR game combined from one person.

That might be the greatest individual game in modern baseball history, at least by total run impact.



Would you like me to show what the estimated runs created (offense) and runs prevented (pitching) would look like numerically for his combined performance? That's another way to visualize it - in raw runs instead of WAR.




Sure!




Nice - let's turn that Ohtani line into numbers. I'll make a few reasonable assumptions and show the arithmetic step-by-step so you can see how the estimates are produced and how sensitive they are to assumptions.

What you told me (facts we use):
Pitched 6.0 innings, 0 earned runs, 10 K.
Hit 3 home runs.



1) Runs prevented by the pitching

We compare Ohtani's 6 innings of 0 runs to a typical league-average pitcher. A typical MLB ERA (recent years) is roughly 4.20 - that's a standard, reasonable baseline for this kind of back-of-the-envelope.

Expected runs allowed by an average pitcher over 6 innings = ERA x (IP / 9).

Digit-by-digit:
ERA = 4.20
IP = 6.0
IP/9 = 6.0 (divided by) 9 = 0.6666666667
ERA x (IP/9) = 4.20 x 0.6666666667 = 2.8 runs

So runs prevented (vs. an average pitcher) = 2.8 runs (because he allowed 0 instead of the 2.8 we'd expect).



2) Runs created by the hitting

We need an estimate for the run value of a home run. Baseball linear-weights often value a home run in the neighborhood of 1.4 1.6 runs (depending on context). I'll show a small range.

For 3 HR, runs created = 3 x (run value per HR).

Calculate three scenarios:
If HR = 1.4 runs -> 3 1.4 = 4.2 runs
If HR = 1.5 runs -> 3 1.5 = 4.5 runs
If HR = 1.6 runs -> 3 1.6 = 4.8 runs

(Those are runs created from the homers only - they ignore any other plate appearances, walks, etc. If he had other PA, add those.)



3) Total game run impact (offense + pitching)

Add runs created (offense) + runs prevented (pitching).

Using the same 2.8 runs prevented:
With HR = 1.4 -> total = 4.2 + 2.8 = 7.0 runs
With HR = 1.5 -> total = 4.5 + 2.8 = 7.3 runs
With HR = 1.6 -> total = 4.8 + 2.8 = 7.6 runs

So the combined net impact (roughly equals) 7.07.6 runs (depending on the HR run-value assumption).

(These numbers represent the total change in expected runs to his team compared with an average pitcher/hitter.)



4) Convert runs to wins (simple rule of thumb)

A common rule: (roughly equals) 10 runs (roughly equals) 1 win (this is a typical seasonal conversion used in many analyses).

So wins-equivalent (roughly equals) total runs (divided by) 10:
7.0 runs -> 0.70 wins
7.3 runs -> 0.73 wins
7.6 runs -> 0.76 wins

So by that simple runs -> wins conversion, the game was worth roughly 0.70.76 wins - i.e., ~0.7 WAR (single-game equivalence).



5) Why I earlier said ~1.11.3 WAR

Different methods give different answers:
The runs-based method above (league-average baseline, 10 runs 1 win) gives ~0.7 WAR for this single game.
A quick WAR-style back-of-the-envelope I gave earlier split offensive and pitching contributions into typical single-game WAR lumps (e.g., a truly monster 3-HR hitting day sometimes gets estimated ~0.60.8 WAR, a dominant 6 IP/10 K scoreless start ~0.50.7 WAR) and then summed them, which produced the ~1.11.3 WAR number.

Those two differ because:
WAR calculations use replacement-level baselines, park and league adjustments, and cumulative seasonal scaling - and different WAR models (Fangraphs, Baseball Reference) treat pitcher vs. hitter contributions differently.
Single-game WAR estimates are noisy and model-dependent, so the simpler runs -> wins method is more transparent and reproducible for a one-game snapshot.



6) Comparisons you asked about

Using the runs method above (the transparent one):
Perfect game (pitching 9 IP, 0 R) compared to the same ERA = 4.20 baseline: runs prevented = 4.20 (9/9) = 4.2 runs.
Compare: Ohtani's combined ~7.07.6 runs > 4.2 runs, so by raw runs prevented/created vs league-average, Ohtani's single-night two-way output exceeds what a perfect game does purely on the pitching side.
A 4-HR hitting game - if a HR 1.5 runs, 4 HR 6 runs created. Ohtani's combined (7.07.6) is still larger than just a 4-HR offensive game.

So: by this runs-based yardstick, Ohtani's night stacks up better than a perfect game or a 4-HR game (because he prevented runs and created a lot of runs).



7) Important caveats
All numbers above are estimates using common, simple assumptions (league ERA 4.20, HR value 1.41.6, 10 runs 1 win). If you change those inputs (use replacement-level ERA, or use actual game leverage for WPA), the result shifts.
WPA (Win Probability Added) can exceed these figures if the homers happened in high-leverage moments (late innings, tie games) - WPA measures game-context impact rather than run totals.
Different WAR models will give different single-game WAR numbers; adding batting WAR + pitching WAR from bill-of-month style models can overstate or understate the reality because of how innings/plate-appearance scale and baselines are applied.



Bottom line (concise)
Using transparent linear assumptions, Ohtani's 6 IP scoreless + 3 HR 7.07.6 runs of net impact, or ~0.70.76 wins (0.7 single-game WAR-equivalent).
That exceeds the raw runs impact of a typical perfect game (4.2 runs prevented) and a 4-HR hitting game (6 runs), so yes - statistically it's one of the most valuable single-game performances you can imagine.

Want me to re-run the numbers with different assumptions? (e.g., use replacement-level ERA instead of league average, or compute WPA-style impact if you tell me the innings and game situation for each HR)

Brewers batted first.
Ohtani struck out the side.

Ohtani then led off the bottom of the 1st with a HR.

Real journalists will answer that question much better than ChatGPT, but that was an interesting first take.

New York media will come out strong for Yankee, Don Larsen, and his World Series perfect game.

But no. What Ohtani did today has no equal.

Shohei Ohtani is an immigrant. He doesn't even speak English. He plays the American game better than any American ever did.

dajo9 said:

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New York media will come out strong for Yankee, Don Larsen, and his World Series perfect game.

But no. What Ohtani did today has no equal.

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Don Larsen needed his teammates to score.
Ohtani scored 3 runs for the offense.

The only way it could be more impressive is if he could have pitched more than 18 outs. Because he didn't need that 3rd homer.

He did need 9 more outs from teammate pitchers.
But I've never seen that before.

dajo9 said:

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Shohei Ohtani is an immigrant. He doesn't even speak English. He plays the American game better than any American ever did.

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Has he followed immigration laws? You can tell the difference between legal and illegal immigrants, right?

These Dodgers may be the first MLB team I've seen just totally sandbag the regular season like an NBA champ does, just to truly unleash themselves in the playoffs. I don't see anyone stopping them.