From 2021-23, Shohei Ohtani was at his peak as a pitcher. Over those three years, he threw nearly 80% of his total career innings to date, with a 2.84 ERA that was bested by only five regular starters – three of whom (Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, and Justin Verlander) are all but assured of Hall of Fame plaques someday.
In August 2023, Ohtani injured his elbow, keeping him off the mound for all of 2024 and much of 2025. That left him time to find his peak as a hitter. You probably remember the 50/50 season in 2024, but over those three years, 2023-25, only Aaron Judge provided more offensive value than Ohtani did, accounting here for both batting (a 1.037 OPS, 154 homers) and baserunning (99 steals).
For all the otherworldly exploits, all the questions about whether he just had The Best Game Ever or The Best Month Ever, all the ways in which we’ve seen him leave Babe Ruth in the dust long ago, there’s still one more thing we haven’t seen Ohtani do, and that’s to put it all together for a full season, to marry Peak Batting Ohtani and Peak Pitching Ohtani together, at the same time, for six months.
It didn’t quite happen in 2021, due to a late-season slump. It didn’t quite happen in 2023, because he missed the last month of the season due to injury. In 2022, he had the great pitching, but hadn’t yet found the top level of his hitting. In 2024-25, he very much had the hitting, yet wasn’t able to take the mound at full strength.
That, even though it’s still so early in the 2026 season, is why we’re thinking about this now. He's healthy, on both sides of the ball, and carries a 0.50 ERA into Wednesday night's start against the Giants in San Francisco.
Consider these two factors ...
Pitching Ohtani seems to be full-go
Last year, recovering from the elbow injury, Pitching Ohtani worked his way back into the rotation slowly, not completing five innings until his 11th start, eventually having the reins loosened during the playoffs.
While the run to Game 7 of the World Series necessarily led to a shortened offseason, it also was a somewhat less stressful one for Ohtani, who had to deal with rehabbing the elbow (prior to 2025) and rehabbing the elbow while also going through an incredibly high-profile free-agent process (prior to 2024). As he said in March, “the previous offseason, just having to go to different facilities, appointments, rehabbing, just felt like every day the day passed by really quick. I just felt like I had a pretty easier offseason mentally.”
With a relatively normal winter behind him, Ohtani, the pitcher, looks as good as he’s ever been. Entering Wednesday night’s game in San Francisco, Ohtani carries a 0.50 ERA, having allowed just one earned run in 18 innings over three starts. Since his return last June, only five other starters with as many innings as he’s thrown have a lower ERA.
“Just because I want to try to win the Cy Young and throw more innings, that’s not necessarily the priority over winning a championship,” he also said. There are very few things Ohtani hasn’t achieved yet, and winning the Cy Young – long one of his personal goals – is on the list.
Hitting Ohtani is still topping Babe Ruth in things
On Monday in Colorado, Ohtani’s third-inning single made for his 52nd consecutive game reaching base, passing Ruth’s career best of 51 games, back in 1923. After Ohtani reached Tuesday night on an infield single in San Francisco to extend the streak to 53 games, the post-1900 Dodgers record (Duke Snider, 58 in 1954) is in sight, though it’s still a long way away from Ted Williams’s record of 84 in 1949.
While Ohtani’s 159 OPS+ is indeed lower than the 185 OPS+ standard he’d set over the last three seasons, there’s not really any cause for worry there other than “it’s early,” as his underlying stats all look similar and his barrel rate – a barrel being the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle – is actually higher than it's ever been, rating in the top five of the sport.
For each of the past five seasons, Ohtani has ended his season in the 8- to 9-WAR range, but the shape of the way he’s made it there hasn’t always been the same. As you can see here, it was at first “combining both pitching and hitting,” then slowly it became all hitting, and last year the pitching started to contribute once again as he slowly worked his way back onto the mound.
What we're thinking about is what happens to that top blue line (total WAR) if we get the best version of the red line (batting) and the gray line (pitching). How high could that go?
Put another way, if we took his best pitching season to date (2022’s 5.6 WAR, via FanGraphs) and his best hitting season (2024’s 9.0 WAR campaign), we’d get a 14.6 WAR season. While that’s obviously a lot to ask, it’s also just taking things he’s already done and seeing what would happen if they were done at the same time. Where would 14.6 WAR rank? Incredibly well, as you’d expect.
Best single seasons by WAR, 1901-pres.
- 14.7 // Ruth, 1923
- 13.7 // Ruth, 1921
- 13.1 // Ruth, 1920
- 12.9 // Ruth, 1927
- 12.7 // Barry Bonds, 2002
- 12.5 // Barry Bonds, 2001
Babe Ruth: Still great. Those peak seasons of his were almost exclusively batting-only, as he’d essentially given up pitching after 1919, and while we can always get into our usual arguments of whether accomplishments in a sport that was at the time pre-integration, pre-night game, pre-air travel, and mostly pre-bullpen should count on the same scale as today, Ruth also maybe left us something of a clue in there.
Aside from the usual concerns of health and production, there are two real sticking points in this pursuit. The first can be found in what we just said about Ruth, that “those peak seasons of his were almost exclusively batting-only.” That also coincides with the advent of the "live ball era" in 1920, when the power part of the game became more accepted, so we can’t simply point to “he stopped pitching and then he hit better.”
But, also, that is what happened to Ruth. It’s generally been what’s happened to Ohtani, too. His two best hitting seasons (2024, ‘25) came when he wasn’t really focusing on pitching. It’s hard to know if all that offense came because he didn’t need to worry about pitching or if that’s simply when his peak time at the plate was always going to come, and splitting his offense between days he pitches and days he doesn’t help that much, because ..
Ohtani, since 2021
… you’ll see that even though he has hit a little better when not pitching, he’s still got a wild OPS of .904 when he does – hardly an issue.
It didn’t seem to bother him in 2023, anyway, when he was doing both – all the “best month ever” talk came out of his June that year, when he had a 3.26 ERA in five starts while also hitting .394/.492/.592 with 15 homers.
The second potential issue? He’s not running anymore.
When Ohtani stole second base off the Rockies in the first inning on Monday, it wasn’t just his first swipe of the season. It was his first attempt. His once-elite Sprint Speed, which once ranked in the 92nd percentile and had settled comfortably into an above-average range around the 70th percentile over the last four seasons, is down to just the 32nd percentile, making it below average. No one thinks this is because he’s not capable of running. It’s because it’s no longer the priority – remember that when he had the 50/50 season, it was during a year where pitching was off the table.
That makes sense enough, though it does remove a potential path of value. In 2024, his 50/50 season, approximately 11% of his offensive value, WAR-wise, came from running the bases. Assuming that's not coming back the way it was, he'd have to make that value up with even more from pitching or hitting.
It is, we acknowledge, deeply unfair to ask for more. Ohtani is a four-time MVP, and the odds-on favorite for a fifth this year. It might be too early to have this conversation. But for the first time in three years, Pitching Ohtani and Batting Ohtani are both fully operational, at the same time. The last time we saw that happen, he’d just begun to scrape the surface of his true hitting potential. What if, after all we’ve seen already, there’s yet one more incredible thing he could offer? At this point, it doesn’t seem like it’s reasonable to count anything out.