MLB playoffs Weird & Wild: Ohtani’s odd October, Misiorowski’s moment, a peculiar punchout

LOS ANGELES — The Death Star is rolling now, friends.

Another day, another victory by the Death Star Dodgers — this time Dodgers 3, Brewers 1, Thursday afternoon at raucous Dodger Stadium.

So we’ve now seen three games in this National League Championship Series. The Dodgers have won all three — and the best way to explain why is to list the hit totals in those three games by a Brewers offense that got more hits this season than all but two teams in the sport:

Game 1 — two hits
Game 2 — three hits
Game 3 — four hits

Get the picture? But if you’ve watched the Dodgers closely in this postseason, you know that something is missing. And what’s that? Aren’t you lucky that the postseason Weird and Wild column is on the case.

The Shoh must go on

He’s human after all: Shohei Ohtani has struck out 17 times in 38 at-bats this postseason. (Harry How / Getty Images)

They’re now 8-1 in this postseason and one win away from a triumphant return to the World Series. But here’s a question for you to ponder about the Death Star Dodgers:

How scary would they be if the MVP wasn’t hitting .158?

Yes, we’re talking about the most Ohtanic man in the baseball universe, Shohei Ohtani. And here’s how his October is going:

• He’s 6-for-38 (.158) in this postseason, with 17 strikeouts. Ouch.

• Since he kicked off this tournament with a two-homer eruption in his first game of the Wild Card Series, he’s only 4 for his last 33 (.121), with one extra-base hit … and that was a leadoff triple Thursday, with just three singles in two weeks in between. Whoa.

• And over the last two series — against the Phillies and Brewers — he’s 3-for-29 (.103), with 14 strikeouts. Yikes.

So what do you want first — the bad news or the good news? OK, we’ll pick.

The bad news is, there must be some serious disturbance in The Force, because this is not the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen to your average superhero.

But here’s the good news: This has happened to a few MVPs over the years. And we can document exactly who they were.

With help from our friends from STATS Perform, we determined that seven players in history have had a lower batting average than .158 in a single postseason, in the same season in which they won the MVP. (Yeah, yeah. It’s true that Ohtani hasn’t been presented with his 2025 NL MVP trophy yet. But let’s just say that won’t be the most suspenseful story of MVP election night.)

We looked at all the MVPs who had at least 20 postseason plate appearances following their MVP season. And surprisingly, some legendary names showed up on this list of men who submerged below the .158 line:

Lowest Postseason Batting Average in MVP Season
(minimum 20 plate appearances)

(*Won World Series) 

Some of the men on that list had to live beneath a big black Couldn’t Hit in October cloud for way too long. Aaron Judge might still be living with it, even after batting .500 this October. Then there was Alex Rodriguez, who couldn’t escape the Not A True Yankee narratives for many of his postseasons in pinstripes.

But then there’s the great Ohtani. Somehow, his long October funk is barely even a storyline. And for that, he can thank all his buddies on the Death Star Dodgers, who have helpfully steamrolled the best teams in the National League night after night, even with the MVP looking practically like a normal human.

So why isn’t this a bigger deal? We think we have that figured out. Here’s why:

He’s still Ohtani! No matter how many outs he makes, no matter how many confused hacks he takes at changeups in the dirt, the Shohei Fear Factor hasn’t gone away.

As we chronicled in our Game 2 column, he recently finished a five-game stretch in which he had more intentional walks (three) than hits (one). And there isn’t another hitter who has ever pulled that off in a postseason since the invention of intentional walks.

“I think the cool thing is, no matter what’s going to happen when he comes to the plate, you can feel the energy,” said injured reliever Michael Kopech. “So I think sure, maybe he’s got a tough skate going on right now, which I think is normal for anybody in baseball. But I think the other team can still feel his presence no matter what.”

Shohei Ohtani slides into third with a first-inning triple in Game 3. (Katharine Lotze / Getty Images)

He’s still had his moments! Ohtani’s leadoff triple Thursday got the Chavez Ravine party started and led to the first run of the Dodgers’ latest win. His RBI single Tuesday drove in a meaningful insurance run. In the two games before that, his late-inning intentional walks led to what turned out to be the winning runs.

So it’s a clear sign that whoever the Dodgers might be playing, that team is still slightly freaked by the thought that Ohtani’s next wave of the bat will be so titanic, some major motion picture studio will decide to make a three-part documentary about it.

It’s just because “you know he can turn it on at any moment,” said second baseman Tommy Edman. “He’s our unicorn. He does some crazy things. And you know it’s just one swing that will turn things around.”

He just launched a batting-practice homer for the ages! There are very few BP home runs that instantly become the stuff of legends. But there’s only one Ohtani. So of course he just bashed one of those — Wednesday during the Dodgers’ workout.

As The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya wrote, it was the first day all year that Ohtani decided to take batting practice on the field. What we didn’t know until Thursday was that nearly the entire team stopped everything to watch the unicorn at work.

So naturally, Ohtani rewarded his compadres by unleashing a gargantuan home run that sailed over the right-field pavilion, bounced off the roof overhead and happily skipped its way out the stadium entirely. No truth to the rumor it finally stopped bouncing in Santa Monica.

“I felt like it was one of the most impressive things that you can see,” said infielder Miguel Rojas, “because you don’t see every single day (a ball that goes) on top of the roof.”

It didn’t count, obviously. But it was a reminder — for both teams — that when this dude squares one up, that baseball could land anywhere from the parking lot to Slovakia.

Because the Dodgers keep winning no matter what he does (or doesn’t)! Do the Dodgers even need him to hit? Apparently not! They’re so overstuffed with star power, they’ve spent the last two and a half weeks bludgeoning every team in their path anyway. And that’s created this weird problem:

We’d love to launch a massive What’s Wrong With Shohei investigation and spend the next week writing 17 stories about it. But it’s tough to do when all his team does is go, so what, and then wins (nearly) every game it plays.

“I’m sure he probably feels like he needs to kind of like be The Guy,” Rojas said. “But we have a team here full of guys that (are) going to step up if we need them to, and until he gets back to hitting like himself.”

Because he might be saving his best act for last! Have you noticed what a great job we’ve done of ignoring the one other elephant in this room? Not sure if anyone has ever reported this before, but Ohtani also has this fun little side gig that MVPs like Judge, A-Rod and Mantle forgot to master. And we’re about to see it Friday, in maybe the Dodgers’ most important game of 2025.

Yes, none of those other MVPs had a chance to escape their October ugliness by being the starting pitcher in the game that lifted their team into the World Series. But guess who is starting for the Dodgers on the mound Friday night, for the potential series clincher.

That’s right. It’s that guy who bludgeoned 55 homers this season when he wasn’t busy spinning off all those 100 mph flameballs and unhittable splitters.

So when he takes the mound in the Southern California twilight Friday, Ohtani has a chance to make us forget everything we’ve just spent the last hour writing about. We’ve never lived on a planet where the leadoff hitter pitches the game that punches his team’s World Series ticket. But …

If the greatest Shoh Man in our sport goes out and does that, no one cruising along the Harbor Freeway is going to care if he’s hitting .158 … or .858. Right?

Sweep dreams

Get out the brooms? Roki Sasaki and the Dodgers are on the verge of history. (Luke Hales / Getty Images)

Nobody has to explain to the Dodgers what those three letters, “LCS,” stand for — because they play in it pretty much every year.

This is their seventh trip to the NLCS in the last 10 years … and their 17th in history. That’s one more than the White Sox, Mariners, Angels, Rays, Marlins and Rockies have played in combined.

But you know one thing the Dodgers have never done? Swept a best-of-seven NLCS — and this is the 12th one they’ve played in.

They’ve won in seven games three times, in six games once and in five games once. They’ve also lost a bunch, also never via a sweep. But on Friday night, they’ll have a chance to run the table, with four in a row over a Brewers team that won the most games in baseball this season.

Oh, and one more thing: During the regular season, the Dodgers went 0-6 against the Brewers. And only one team in history has ever been swept by a team during the season, then turned around to pull a revenge sweep in the LCS. That was Daniel Murphy’s 2015 Mets over the Cubs.

Nobody hits the Miz

Rookie Jacob Misiorowski delivered an all-time relief appearance in Game 3. (Luke Hales / Getty Images)

The record books will tell us that Brewers rocket launcher Jacob Misiorowski was the losing pitcher in Game 3. But when the dust settles and we think back on this day, that isn’t what the 51,251 eyewitnesses will remember about him.

The Miz faced 19 hitters — and struck out nine of them. And what makes that suitable for this column is: He was not the starting pitcher in this game. So there’s some stuff you need to know about that:

• It was the most strikeouts by a rookie relief pitcher in postseason history.

• It was the biggest postseason strikeout game by a reliever, period, in the 2000s.

• Once upon a time, Pedro Martinez (1999), Wes Gardner (1988), Roger Craig (1964) and Ryne Duren (1958) struck out eight in October relief. But the only two relief pitchers in history to strike out more hitters in a postseason game than Misiorowski were Moe Drabowsky (11, in the 1966 World Series) and Jesse Barnes (10, in the 1921 World Series).

So all that was cool, but here’s the Weirdest and Wildest tidbit of them all.

Misiorowski did this at age 23. And what you saw him do in this game is something almost nobody has done at that age.

Over the last 40 years, if we exclude extra-inning games, you know how many pitchers that young have racked up that many K’s in relief in a regular-season game? That would be exactly two. One was Johan Santana, for the Twins, on Sept. 2, 2002. The other was José Núñez, for Toronto, on July 4, 1987. And that … is … it.

Santana later became a starter and won two Cy Young awards. Would it be a shock if we found ourselves saying that about Misiorowski in 20 years? Not if you were paying attention Thursday.

Two strikes, you’re out (of the game)!

Jackson Chourio’s Game 3 exit led to another strange strikeout in this postseason. (Harry How / Getty Images)

Finally, in the seventh inning Thursday, we got another reminder that baseball is the Weirdest, Wildest sport ever invented. And of course, we mean that as a compliment.

That’s because something happened that would not be possible if baseball was one of those logical sports. But luckily, we won’t ever have to worry about that! So what happened, you ask?

The Brewers’ Jackson Chourio struck out in that inning (against Blake Treinen) … despite the slight technicality that he wasn’t even on the field when he whiffed.

So how, you may be wondering, is that possible? Well, it’s possible because when that at-bat started, Chourio was in fact on the field … and in the batter’s box. But then everything got all mixed up, as it so often does in this sport.

With an 0-2 count, Chourio took a ferocious hack, fouled off a Treinen sweeper and began writhing in pain. He’d just aggravated a persistent hamstring strain, hopped around for a few minutes trying to get it to calm down, then gave up and hopped right into the dugout.

So Blake Perkins came out to pinch hit for him, and eventually swung and missed at a 2-and-2 sweeper to complete the strikeout …

Just not his strikeout.

The rules say the hitter who compiles the first two strikes gets “credit” for the strikeout, even though somebody else swung and missed at strike three. And if that makes actual sense to you, you need to apply for work as an official scorer immediately.

But none of that is even the Weird and Wild part. The Weird and Wild part is, we can’t even tell you that’s the strangest strikeout of this postseason … because it’s not the only time it’s happened.

Back on Oct. 1, in Game 2 of the Dodgers’ Wild Card Series against Cincinnati, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts got so exasperated by Emmet Sheehan’s lack of command, he gonged Sheehan out of that game with a 1-and-2 count on the Reds’ Will Benson.

In marched left-hander Alex Vesia to pitch. So the Reds sent up a pinch hitter for Benson (Miguel Andujar). Which led to the wackiest postseason strikeout of the century — when Vesia managed to punch out a hitter he never even faced (i.e., Benson).

But here’s the part that fried our brainwaves: What were the odds that two different hitters in the same postseason would strike out when they weren’t anywhere near the batter’s box?

That seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to ask our friends from STATS Perform. It took a while to find the answer, but, of course, they did.

Our first hunch was that it was possible this never happened once in the entire regular season. Nope! It actually happened five times (although none of those involved the Dodgers).

But the big question was: How many times could it possibly have happened in any postseason game in history — or at least back to 1974, which is as far back as we have reliable public play-by-play data?

Thanks to the diligence of Sam Hovland and Tom Poquette, we can now present this wild list — of all the players in the last 51 years to strike out in a postseason game after they were out of the game: 

DATE	SERIES	TEAMS	K’d
10/15/1981	ALCS	A’s-Yankees	Dwayne Murphy
10/14/2001	ALDS	A’s-Yankees	Jermaine Dye
10/1/2025	NLWC	Reds-Dodgers	Will Benson
10/16/2025	NLCS	Brewers-Dodgers	Jackson Chourio

In other words … twice in 50 years … and then … twice in two weeks — in the same postseason. Which feels so Weird … and so Wild … and not even remotely logical … except for one thing: We’re talking about …

Baseball!