Who’s ready to argue about a hypothetical scenario that could never happen outside of a video game?

Shohei Ohtani grabs his 34-inch wooden crushing device, straps an elbow guard onto his right arm and some padding to his right wrist, takes a few practice cuts, digs into the left-handed batter’s box and looks up to lock eyes with…

Shohei Ohtani: The right-handed, flame-throwing, filth-slinging, early favorite to win the 2023 American League Cy Young Award.

Does Ohtani hit the 134th home run of his MLB career?

Or does Ohtani record his 480th strikeout as a pitcher in the big leagues?

Initial Observations/Suppositions

Early in his career, Ohtani the Pitcher would have absolutely dominated this matchup with his off-speed stuff.

Per Baseball Savant, between 2018 and 2019, 31 of Ohtani’s 40 home runs came against fastballs. (He was, and still is, deadliest against sinkers.) He had a .616 slugging percentage against fastballs compared to .425 against off-speed and breaking pitches. And while he only pitched 51.2 innings between those two seasons, his splitter, sweeper and curveball were all drastically more destructive than his four-seamer.

Over the past three years, however, things have changed.

In 2021, half Ohtani’s 46 home runs came against non-fastballs, as the AL MVP kind of mashed everything—but especially sliders, against which he slugged .724. Last year, 18 of his 34 home runs were on non-fastballs, and he hit .346 against curveballs. And this year, Ohtani’s six homers have come against a sinker, a slider, a curveball, a changeup and a pair of those hip and trendy sweepers.

For his first few years in the big leagues, he annihilated sinkers but often flailed at the off-speed stuff.

These days, he’s a much more indiscriminate hitter.

All the while, Ohtani has also evolved on the mound.