Shohei Ohtani’s 100th career homer as a Dodger is also his hardest hit

PITTSBURGH — Shohei Ohtani’s 100th home run as a Los Angeles Dodger screamed into the right field seats at PNC Park before anyone could even process it. That’s because the three-time MVP turned around the Bubba Chandler fastball at 120 mph, breaching a threshold that just five homers over the last decade of Statcast tracking have ever eclipsed. The ball cleared the 21-foot wall in right field just 3.6 seconds after it left Ohtani’s bat.

Ohtani is now the fastest in franchise history to reach the milestone, requiring just 294 games to pass Gary Sheffield’s mark of 399 before he cleared the century mark.

120 mph for Shohei’s 100th homer as a Dodger! pic.twitter.com/iIukEIr5UP

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) September 2, 2025

“I’m not surprised by it,” manager Dave Roberts said recently as Ohtani neared the mark. “But I guess I was just more of, I don’t know what to expect. Just happy to have him in a Dodger uniform and see how it plays out. He’s just had an incredible run in a short period of time.”

He reached it with the hardest-hit ball of his career, joining Oneil Cruz, Giancarlo Stanton, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Aaron Judge as the only players, since 2015, to hit a home run at 120 mph or harder. It wasn’t even the hardest-hit ball in this ballpark this season, as Cruz’s record mark of 122.9 mph happened in May.

Of those home runs, none came on a pitch as hard as the 99.2 mph fastball that Ohtani pulled against Chandler.

With his 46th blast of the season, Ohtani is also still in hot pursuit of topping the career-high and franchise record mark of 54 home runs he slugged in his first year of a record-setting 10-year deal. This, all while returning to the mound: his next start is Wednesday.

(Photo: Joe Sargent / Getty Images)