Ohtani homers and tosses five shutout innings in Dodgers win

Shohei Ohtani homered on the first pitch and then held San Diego to three hits over five scoreless innings, turning a 4-0 Dodgers win at Petco Park into a sharper statement about baseball’s most unusual standard. Four weeks had passed since Ohtani last pitched and hit in the same game, and the return looked less like a novelty than a benchmark for what dominance can mean when one player controls both the mound and the box.

The home run off Padres starter Randy Vásquez was Ohtani’s eighth of the season and the 27th leadoff homer of his career. It also placed him in an almost empty corner of the sport’s record book: only one player in major league history had ever hit a leadoff homer in a game he started as pitcher, and Ohtani has now done it twice. The latest blast also extended a run that has become its own category of excellence, with Ohtani homering in a scoreless start for the seventh time, including the postseason, breaking a tie with Bob Gibson for the most such games since at least 1900.

On the mound, Ohtani did not need overpowering stuff to control the night. He threw 88 pitches, his fewest in a pitching start since his first outing of the season, and allowed only three hits while striking out four and walking two. His ERA dropped to 0.73, the lowest in Major League Baseball among pitchers with at least 25 innings. Ohtani said through his interpreter that he did not feel sharp and carried plenty of uncertainty into the outing, but the results still gave Los Angeles exactly what Dave Roberts needed in a tight divisional series.

The Dodgers took two of three from the Padres and clinched the series in San Diego, a result that matters beyond one May game. Roberts had recently kept Ohtani off the mound in some pitching starts because of an offensive slump in April and early May, but with a day off looming Thursday he put him back in the lineup and got immediate payoff. For the Dodgers, Ohtani’s value is not just that he can flash brilliance in two roles. It is that he can still alter the shape of a game, and perhaps a postseason ceiling, on the same night.