Ohtani & Trout. Thrill Shot's 2023 Championship Moment of the Year.
Gratitude on the cosmic scale for the final six pitches of the 2023 World Baseball Classic.
On March 20, 2023, Japan trailed Mexico 5-4 in the bottom of the ninth in the World Baseball Classic semifinals.
The United States pummeled Cuba 14-2 the day before and awaited a championship opponent. Mexico needed three outs to earn a rematch of their Pool C win over their neighbors to the north. Japan needed two runs to meet the pre-tournament expectations of reaching the title game.
Shohei Ohtani led off with a double. Masataka Yoshida walked. Ukyo Shuto pinch ran. Munetaka Murakami doubled. Zero outs. Two runs. 6-5 Japan.
“All the stars are lined up for the big matchup,” Ohtani said in an on-field interview after the semifinal, “and it’s the most ideal matchup that we thought of, and it’s coming true tomorrow, so let’s get it going.”
The stars are lined up.
Maybe Ohtani referred to the rosters set to face each other in the final, full of Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball All-Stars and MVPs.
Or maybe he referred to the ancient, cross-cultural notion that forces beyond our understanding orchestrate events here on Earth. Fate. Destiny. Wyrd. Providence. Fortune.
It’s the most ideal matchup … coming true tomorrow.
He knew the names on the two rosters, and he knew they were laden with accolades from the sport’s two highest-level competitions.
There’s no way he could know that the most ideal matchup within the most ideal matchup would happen in the ninth inning on the next day.
The most ideal matchup
On March 21, 2023, Japan led the United States 3-2 in the top of the ninth in the World Baseball Classic final.
Japan sent 2021 American League MVP Shohei Ohtani, designated hitter and starting pitcher, to the mound to close the game.
Ohtani walked 2022 National League batting champion Jeff McNeil. 2018 AL MVP Mookie Betts grounded into a double play. Two outs. One-run lead.
Three-time AL MVP Mike Trout stepped into the batter’s box.
The stars are lined up.
Two captains, playing in their first WBC tournaments, who led their teams onto the field holding their nations’ flags, would end or extend the contest.
Los Angeles Angels teammates opposed each other. They hit in the same lineup for the previous five seasons. Trout patrolled center field while Ohtani pitched.
“I haven’t faced [Ohtani] in live [batting practice],” Trout told Betts months later. “I haven’t seen him. I’ve just seen him from behind. I know what he can do from behind. The movement is unbelievable.”
Trout would face Ohtani’s four-seam fastball, which averaged 97.3 mph in 2022, and his array of breaking pitches, as a hitter for the first time with no outs to spare and a championship at stake.1
“There was one thing on my mind,” Trout said. “I was trying to take him deep.”
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
you must first invent the universe.”
- Carl Sagan
Coming true tomorrow
Let’s talk about how we got here, naming this moment as 2023 Championship Moment of the Year.
We’re 10 months away from that WBC final, and the more I researched this story, the more awe I felt. The who, what, where, when, why and how of Trout and Ohtani as each other’s final WBC obstacle astounded me.
So much had to happen to get to a moment that feels like it was destined to occur.
First, that semifinal against Mexico turned on two moments of thin margins.
Down 3-0, Masataka Yoshida golfed a pitch below the strike zone for three-run homer off the right field foul pole in the bottom of the 7th. The pitch dipped down and in, and Yoshida scooped it just far enough but not too far to tie the game 3-3.
In the ninth, Japan needed two runs to win because Yoshida threw out Joey Meneses at home by six inches after Mexico’s third base coach, Tony Perezchica, sent Meneses to score in the 8th, despite Yoshida fielding the ball cleanly before the runner reached third base. That ended the inning and kept the deficit at 5-4.
Now, let’s widen the lens, beyond the close calls that advanced Japan from the previous round, to how Trout and Ohtani overlapped in Los Angeles.
Ohtani joined the Angels from the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in 2018, reinforcement for Trout, who had just finished his worst full season, finishing fourth in MVP voting.2
Ohtani won AL Rookie of the Year in 2018. Trout was AL MVP runner-up that year, and he won the award again in 2019. Ohtani won a unanimous MVP in 2021, then finished second in 2022.3
Trout could’ve departed Ohtani and the Angels, but he signed a 12-year deal in 2020, sticking with the team that drafted him 25th overall out of high school in 2009 despite one playoff appearance, a sweep by the Kansas City Royals in 2014.
The phrase “Ohtani joins Trout” feels like it should have been a tectonic shift in baseball’s power structure, but the game doesn’t work like that. Ohtani and Trout did not make the playoffs. The Angels finished just below .500 every year these two played together.
And this is where the question of how we got here extends beyond the marginal moments and top-tier roster combinations into the design of baseball. Two extraordinary players cannot carry a lineup of nine.4
To borrow some descriptions from the parlance of video and board games, baseball is a turn-based programming game. The manager sends out a lineup for the day, and the fundamental choices of participation have been made. The only way for the Angels to tilt the percentages towards Trout and Ohtani’s involvement in the game is to bat them early for more turns and to select them in as many lineups as possible.5
The only way to give elite hitters the opportunity to participate in high-leverage, championship-level turns is to fill the lineup with players likely to keep the turns coming. If the whole group avoids outs, then the whole group gets more turns.
The Angels fell short in filling out the other seven spots in their lineups. Japan and the United States did not have that problem. These two rosters propelled Ohtani and Trout back to the plate — through pool play and the knockout rounds to the final — by trotting out lineups constructed out of MVPs, All-Stars and league leaders from the two strongest leagues in the world.
The 2023 United States roster took enough turns to earn Mike Trout the most meaningful at-bat of his career.
And the Fighters, the Angels and Samurai Japan all allowed Shohei Ohtani to do something unheard of past high school baseball: keep taking turns at the plate and at the mound.
Back to the design of the game for a moment, with some evolution added.
The confrontation between pitcher and batter involves the execution of such precise movement patterns that baseball evolved success through specialization. Refining a swing means time not spent refining a pitch grip or delivery mechanics. Every elite confrontation happens against an opponent whose sole job is to execute the opposing movements perfectly, and then do it again and again and again.
Ohtani showed such promise at maintaining his swing and his delivery that no baseball organization required him to drop one for the other. He specialized twice and wins both sides of the confrontation frequently enough to earn favorable comparisons to Babe Ruth.6
There’s yet another layer to this extraordinary confrontation. Ohtani starts games. He doesn’t close them. Starters warm up before games, not during them.
While Trout played center field for the US in the 8th inning, Ohtani broke from his hitting and pitching routines to run back and forth from the dugout to the bullpen to face McNeil, Betts and Trout for the 9th.
“You knew it was going to end like this,” Trout said.
Ohtani entered the game, issued a walk to a batting champion and induced a double play from an MVP.
And here we are.
So let’s get it going
The ideal matchup within the ideal matchup contained a perfect story arc that plays out over the necessary pitches to fill the count and decide the outcome.
Slider down. Trout takes. 1-0.
Fastball low. Trout swings. 1-1. Epic music plays in the stadium.
Fastball cuts outside. Trout takes. 2-1.
Fastball, middle-middle. Trout swings through it. This is the pitch. This is where Trout would’ve taken Ohtani deep. But he missed it. 2-2.
The fastest fastball of the at-bat — 102 mph according to the FOX broadcast — scuffs the dirt and bounds away. 3-2.
Slider away. If you pause with the ball between Ohtani and Trout, it appears to be headed toward the zone. In the next frame, the pitch veers outside while Trout is halfway through his swing. Strike three.
The broadcast angles put us in Trout’s usual position when Ohtani pitches, out in center field. And modern broadcast extras like the strike zone box, the circle marking where the ball crosses the front plane of the plate, the speed of the pitch, and additional reply angles increase the drama.
But now that you know how we got to this moment, here’s a Trout’s-eye view of the at-bat.
I originally titled this story “Ohtani vs. Trout.” It’s not wrong, but “&” felt more correct for this ideal matchup. Teammates opposing one another in the brightest spotlight of both their careers.7
They are both entangled in this moment for beyond the rest of their lives. Ohtani won and Trout lost, but we got a six-pitch story that will live on as highlights and be talked about as a legend for as long as people care about baseball.
“To be honest, I was pretty nervous on the mound out there,” Ohtani said after the final. “But more than that, I just wanted to appreciate the game of baseball, appreciate the opportunity that baseball gave me, at this great stage, to face Mike Trout at the end.”
Thanks for reading Thrill Shot. If you’ve got a different favorite championship moment from 2023’s sports cycle, I’d love to read it in the comments. And I’ll be keeping an eye out for the 2024 Moment of the Year.
My daughter made the illustration of Ohtani exclaiming after striking out Trout. I am grateful she let me use it for this story.
According to Baseball Savant, “Ohtani relies on 7 pitches.” They list his four-seamer and his sweeper as 64.7% of his total pitches in 2022. Also, they differentiate between his sweeper (37.4%) and his slider (2.4%). The movement profiles of the two pitches are similar enough to spawn many “What’s the difference between a sweeper and a slider?” articles and videos. For our purposes, know this: Trout understood that he would be facing top-tier velocity and top-tier movement designed to play off that velocity to fool him.
2017 was Trout’s first full season not in the top two on the AL MVP ballot. He played about 40 fewer games than his average due to injuries, but still led the league in on base percentage-plus-slugging percentage (OPS). For non-baseball people, that’s saying that Trout safely reached base at a higher rate than every other player, and he progressed further around the bases more than other hitters.
This was the year Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs in New York, and many people still believed Ohtani’s season was better than a Yankee breaking Roger Maris’s American League home run record. That is the stuff of legend, and Ohtani’s hitting/pitching combo earned him two first place votes over Judge.
This is the greatest baseball tweet. (Just in case you don’t know this — I don’t want Thrill Shot readers to feel bamboozled here — Tungsten Arm O’Doyle was not real. Plenty of old timey players got the nickname “Steel Arm” because some guys threw for mind-boggling innings totals back in the early days of baseball. And the Akron Groomsmen were not real, but the Brooklyn Bridegrooms were.)
Compare with basketball, soccer, hockey and American football. Each turn involves a choice of who will execute the play. The best basketball player can take as many shots as they need to, without waiting for eight different teammates to shoot.
“Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.” — the version of Babe Ruth who speaks to Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez in “The Sandlot.” Ohtani’s exploits earned him hero status and favorable comps to a sports legend in a relatively short amount of time and while he’s still playing.
Ohtani won the 2016 Japan Series with the Fighters, but I bet approximately one of my subscribers knew that (John, the one who’s actually been to a game in Sapporo). Okay, maybe two (also Jeff the pitching coach?).