Did Shohei Ohtani’s All-Time Great NLCS Performance Break Baseball?

Orlando Ramirez / Getty Images

Ohtani’s historic three-homer, 10-strikeout masterpiece in the Dodgers’ clinching win over the Brewers may have just changed baseball forever

Shohei Ohtani’s all-time great three-homer, 10-strikeout game on Friday in the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Game 4, pennant-clinching win over the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series was not only the greatest single-game performance in baseball history, it may have just broken baseball and could lead to the game changing forever.

Let me explain how.

It’s no secret that MLB owners want a salary cap when the current collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2026 season. And since the players’ union would never go for that, it’s widely assumed that a lockout will go into effect in a little over a year, potentially extending into the 2027 season.

“The league has come out and said they were going to lock us out,” MLB Players Association Executive Director Tony Clark told me at All-Star week in Atlanta back in July. “We don’t believe salary caps are good for players or are good for the game. We believe salary caps are actually anti-competition. There are ways to improve our systems without a restriction of player compensation.”

Ohtani’s legendary performance led the Dodgers to sweep the Brewers and claim a spot in the World Series, which begins Friday night. The 31-year-old winner of three MVP awards struck out the side in the top of the first inning before hitting a 446-foot bomb at 116.5 miles per hour off the bat for a solo home run to lead off the bottom of the first. After walking in the second and striking out three more hitters, Ohtani walloped an even bigger homer in the fourth, a 469-foot solo shot to right center field at 116.9 off the bat to make it 4-0. He added another solo blast to dead center field in the seventh inning, capping off an evening of two-way brilliance and mastery we’ve never seen before.

Ohtani and the Dodgers won four straight against a Milwaukee team that finished with MLB’s best regular season record at 97-65 despite a $115 million payroll that’s less than a third of LA’s league-high $350 million total. The Dodgers flat-out dominated baseball’s best-run small-market club, proving that even the most shrewd management often can’t overcome the spending disparity against Goliaths like Los Angeles. Led by Shohei, the Dodgers are -230 favorites to win their second straight title, per FanDuel Sportsbook. If they win the World Series against the American League champion Toronto Blue Jays, they’d become the first MLB team to win back-to-back titles since the 1999-00 New York Yankees, which were at the height of their Evil Empire dynasty that won four titles in five years.

An LA championship could prompt opposing owners to scream that the Dodgers are just too damn good and that a salary cap is vital for competitive balance in baseball. And if owners are insistent on implementing a cap and the players are insistent that a cap is “anti-competition,” you’re potentially looking at a stalemate that may not be resolved for a long time.

So, it’s very possible that following the greatest individual single-game performance in MLB history, Ohtani’s brilliance proves that baseball’s current system, where the Dodgers spend twice as much as the average payroll, is broken and in need of a salary cap that would forever change the game.