No matter which arms they threw at him, the Blue Jays couldn’t find an answer for the Dodgers’ two-way superstar in Game 3 of the World Series. Ohtani knocked four extra-base hits in his first four trips to the plate on Monday night — two doubles and two homers, the last of which knotted the contest at 5 in the seventh inning.
The game-tying blast in the seventh was Ohtani’s eighth of these playoffs, tying Corey Seager’s franchise record set in 2020 for the most homers in a single postseason. More importantly, it kept the pressure on a Blue Jays team that had just squeaked ahead in the top of the inning.
Ohtani is just the second player in Major League history with four extra-base hits in a World Series game, joining Frank Isbell in 1906.
The first pair of hits came off Max Scherzer. It was the first matchup between a three-time MVP winner and a three-time Cy Young winner in the World Series since 2009, when Pedro Martinez and Alex Rodriguez faced off, and both rounds went to Ohtani.
Ohtani led off the game with a double before taking Scherzer deep for a solo shot in the bottom of the third. Coupled with a Teoscar Hernández solo homer one inning earlier, that briefly built a 2-0 Dodgers lead before the Blue Jays stormed back for four runs (two earned) in the fourth off Tyler Glasnow.
But Ohtani and the Dodgers answered back. With one on in the fifth, the Blue Jays called on lefty Mason Fluharty to face the top of the order that features lefties Ohtani and Freddie Freeman bookending Mookie Betts.
Ohtani had faced Fluharty three prior times and only had three strikeouts to show for it. But this time, he went the other way for an RBI double before Freeman drove him in to tie the game.
Then came Ohtani’s turn to make it a new ballgame, one half-inning after the Blue Jays had pulled ahead by a run in the top of the seventh. Seranthony DomÃnguez left a fastball squarely over the heart of the plate, and Ohtani sent the mistake pitch sailing into the seats in left field.
Between his statement three-homer game in NLCS Game 4 and World Series Game 3, Ohtani became the first player with multiple games of 12 or more total bases in a single postseason. The only other player with two such games in a postseason career is none other than Babe Ruth.
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