The best possible scenario for a Shohei Ohtani at-bat is also the rarest: one in which a walk instantly ends the game. With two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth in a tie contest between the Rays and Dodgers on Friday night, the goals for the men at the plate and on the mound could not have been clearer. For the Los Angeles DH Ohtani, get on base through any means necessary. For Tampa reliever Colin Poche, throw him your best stuff and pray he hits it at a fielder. There would be no pitching around the NL's OPS leader. Poche had to challenge him, and Ohtani had the luxury of knowing his enemy's predicament.
Poche's first pitch was an 84-mile-per-hour slider that seemed to hang an extra beat just ahead of the plate before dipping down toward the bottom of the strike zone. There was no second pitch. Ohtani connected with that smooth, violent swing of his and sent a fly ball to deep, deep center. Rays outfielder Jose Siri prolonged the suspense by trying to time his leap for a robbery, but the longball instead bounced off an unlucky first-row fan and back onto the field.
It was a walk-off grand slam that, combined with an easy stolen base he'd picked up earlier in the game, placed Ohtani in the 40/40 club. (He'd add another dinger on Saturday.) Until he finally gets a chance to show what he can do in the playoffs, this will stand as his most thrilling and dramatic highlight yet: pure, effortless heroism from a man who makes me feel fortunate to share the Earth with him, even in a year where he's prevented from pitching. Nobody hits a baseball like Ohtani hits a baseball—consistently emphatic, spectacularly effective, but also with this hint of vulnerability, like that brief moment of contact is the only time in his life when the pressure of being Shohei Ohtani disappears completely. These feats of strength are awesome, and yet they're the one part of Ohtani's celebrity that's somewhat recognizable to an average person: those fleeting moments in life when everything is suddenly ordered in exactly the right way, when you're both confident and ecstatic and you feel like you almost understand the unknowable reason why you are where you are.
I was watching Aliens with my roommate at home when I saw that this game was tied in the ninth, and I pulled it up on my laptop. Rarely do I make such good decisions on Friday nights. My jaw literally hung open, statuesque, once I processed that the ball had made it over the fence, and then, grinning like a child, I basically forgot the movie and looked for the highlight as quickly as I could. There's only one redeeming quality left in Twitter, and it's that this video loops endlessly. I watched again and again until every part solidified in my brain—the quiet first second, the crack and the immediate screams, the long stretch of anticipation as the camera followed Siri to the wall, Joe Davis's key change as the ball touched down, Ohtani's calm trot around the bases, his endearingly awkward snubbed high-five as Miguel Rojas waited for him to actually reach home, and then the water shower before it all began again.
A jersey of Babe Ruth's, the player to whom Ohtani is most often compared, just sold for an obscene $24 million at auction, assisted by the claim that this was the get-up he wore for the called shot in the 1932 World Series. That's too much to pay for hand-me-down clothing, but I was struck especially by this quote from Chris Ivy, Heritage Auctions' director of sports auctions: "This is essentially the Mona Lisa." I get where he's coming from, to an extent—a legendary item, touched by one of the most famous men of all time, that holds unprecedented value. But what that jersey really represents is the Mona Lisa's frame. It's an intriguing artifact without much meaning outside of its connection to the art it represents—a painting, or a home run.
Art is an act of creation. What Ruth created, what Ohtani creates, is an experience that brings together tens of thousands of people live in a ballpark, that inspires millions more. Then or now, their careers are about seeing rare greatness, knowing it, and enjoying the privilege to love it. That magnetic pull toward Ohtani's grand slam video is remarkably similiar to that attraction I get when I double or triple back in a museum to take another look at a painting that won't leave my head. Eventually, I move on. But the imprint remains.
