Despite World Series struggles, Shohei Ohtani’s 2024 will go down as one of the best seasons ever

It was a bumpy landing, but Shohei Ohtani made his mark on MLB history this year with a season that will be remembered as one of the greatest in the history of the sport.

Think about the pressure on the Japanese superstar when he put pen to paper on a $700 million contract. Think about how he spent so much of his off-field time rehabbing a surgically repaired right elbow. Think about the personal strife he went through when it was revealed that his best friend had stolen millions of dollars from him.

Ohtani could have been crushed by 2024. He could have failed to meet the biggest expectations in baseball, and he would’ve had plenty of excuses for it. Instead, he put together a campaign that belongs in Japanese folklore as much as it does in the annals of baseball history.

It all revolves around MLB’s first 50-home-run, 50-stolen-base season. It didn’t feel possible until Ohtani did it. Before the 2024 season, the closest any player had come was Alex Rodriguez hitting 42 homers and swiping 46 bags in 1998.

Ohtani ended up hitting 54 homers and stealing 59 bases, and he crossed the 50-50 threshold in the grandest possible fashion.

No player has come to define the word “unprecedented” as much as Ohtani, and he distilled it into one game on Sept. 19, when he posted three homers, two stolen bases, five extra-base hits, six hits and 10 RBI. No player had posted all those totals in any number of games across an entire career, and Ohtani did it all in one day at Marlins Park.

There’s now a Part 2 to that stat. No player had hit 50 homers in a season, stolen 50 bases in a season, won MVP and won a World Series title in their career. With the Dodgers’ World Series victory on Wednesday in Game 5 and Ohtani likely to be a unanimous National League MVP, he is again about to enjoy a career’s worth of prosperity in minimal time.

This is how you turn a subpar World Series performance into a footnote: Be the player who got your team there, then get uplifted by your teammates. And make no mistake — the Dodgers would have been in dire straits had they not had Ohtani this year.

It’s as close to an objective fact as we can get. Baseball Reference calculates Ohtani to have been worth 9.2 wins above replacement his season, just as a designated hitter. Had the Dodgers not acquired him and made the likely move of re-signing J.D. Martinez instead, they would’ve been left with a DH who posted 0.5 WAR in 2024.

With nine fewer wins, the Dodgers don’t have the best record in MLB and home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. With nine fewer wins, they go 89-73, the same record as the first-out Arizona Diamondbacks. Without Ohtani, the Dodgers probably aren’t even a playoff team this year.

So you can forgive Ohtani for going 2-for-19 in the 2024 World Series, especially when it wasn’t entirely clear if he should have even played after Game 2, when a stolen base attempt left him writhing in pain in the dirt. He was later diagnosed with a minor subluxation and given the green light to continue playing, but his swing never looked quite right after the series arrived at Yankee Stadium, and earlier this week, Ohtani did not rule out offseason surgery to fix the issue.

Ohtani gave everything he physically could this season, and he’ll receive his first World Series ring for it. It was a validation of the pitch the Dodgers gave him last winter, as he said when he was introduced as a Dodger:

Ohtani, as well as his teammate Yoshinobu Yamamoto, has now won a World Series title, a Japan Series title and a World Baseball Classic title by the age of 30. This championship figures to be a seminal moment in Japan, which watched their national hero reach the apex of his career a little before 1 p.m. local time on a workday.

And just think: Ohtani can pitch again next year.