In my spare time, I write a newsletter about paid cycling, because my idea of a hobby is “my day job, but on wheels.” (It’s called Wheelysports, you can find it on Medium or sign up here to get it by email. It’s free, it comes out once a week. The last show was about a guy who had to quit racing because of a perineal cyst. It’s fun.)
In the world of cycling, there is a young boy from Slovenia named Tadej Pogačar who is throwing everyone and different. The title says he has won the Tour de France four times and will take a record fifth title this summer at the age of 28, but that undercuts his dominance over the past few years. I don’t think it’s controversial anymore, he’s the best to ever do it.
And it’s not just that Pogačar is the best cyclist in the world; he is the best in every aspect of the sport, which is incredibly rare. That level of flexibility hasn’t been heard since the days of Eddy Merckx, the Babe Ruth of cycling.
Pogačar’s works are amazing, and every week it seems he sets a new record or does something historic, but after years of writing about him, I’m starting to run out of things to say. There are no elites left who can compete with such a great athlete.
Sound like someone you know?
Shohei Ohtani’s pitch was that he would be among the best hitters in the league and among the best pitchers in the league, at the same time. As we now know, those hopes made him somewhat acceptable. In 2024 and 2025, he was the best hitter in the National League, and now, Ohtani leads the major leagues in ERA, at 0.97.
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It’s obviously early. You know how I can say? No. 2 in ERA is Ohtani’s teammate Justin Wrobleski, who has 15 strikeouts and 10 walks in 36 innings but a 1.25 ERA. (Now that’s something I’ve never seen before, maybe I should be writing about Wrobleski instead.)
I don’t know that Ohtani really does anything different this season. It’s still a seven-seamer arsenal with high-90s velocity on his four-seamer and sinker. For righties, especially the four-seamer and the sweeper, which has been his preferred strategy since about 2022. Against lefties, he throws 48% four-seamers, and 20% curveballs and splitters each.
The path to righties is pretty normal, at least for a pitcher who can hit 100 mph and pull a broom that doesn’t feel the effects of gravity. A lot of guys who throw hard fastball-sweepers (Paul Skenes, Griffin Jax, Orion Kerkering, Gavin Williams) like to use their sinker more than Ohtani, but they’re all in the same family. Here’s Ohtani’s stuff against the righties.
And here’s Kerker’s.
If you can throw 100 mph from a 35ish-degree arm angle, and spin a sweeper, that seems like a good way to keep up with similar-handed hitters. It works, so while Ohtani has put together a pitch mix, he’s maintained the same basic technique through many years, many teams, and many arm injuries.
Ohtani’s approach to lefties, however, is less stable.
Over the years, he has gone more or less divisive, more or less sinker, more or less cutter. The cutter survived both his recent Tommy John surgery and the move to Southern California, but he’s not really throwing this year. Ohtani’s slider is also essentially a show-me pitch at this point.
His four most common pitches against lefties are the obvious ones to pick. He has a basic pitch (the four-seamer), a pitch designed to be used against opposite-handed hitters (the splitter), and his second-best pitch (the sweeper). Then there’s the curveball.
Ohtani’s curveball averages 23.5 mph faster than his fastball, which you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at this graph, because the difference in motion between the two pitches is about 30 inches vertically and about 20 inches horizontally. Imagine having to cover both 100 mph uphill terrain and this cloverleaf highway intersection for a wrecking ball. I was calling in sick.
Think about what Ohtani has thrown this year compared to last year. His regular season contributions were minimal in 2025: a 2.87 ERA, but in just 47 innings. He will eclipse last year’s innings in the next two weeks unless he gets injured again. And last year, Ohtani’s regular-season goal-scoring performance wasn’t exactly his best performance from the jump. It was about getting back into playoff shape after nearly two years away from his last competitive spot.
So he got a small kitchen sink in 2025. His use of four-seamers against lefties was similar — the heater is the rock Ohtani’s church is built on — but he threw five different pitches between 8% and 12% of the time against them. I don’t even want to call that a strategy; that is the mystery box.
In Ohtani’s second season as a Dodgers player, he has gone to make things easier. Two right scenes, three left scenes. He still throws three more pitches from time to time, but they will break out on special occasions.
Because the basics work. You can see Zach Cole’s curveball-fastball combination here.
And Ohtani follows that up by saying… wait, were Todd Kalas and Geoff Blum singing “Ms. Jackson” with Outkast back then? I’d be surprised how hip and hip they both are, but “Ms. Jackson” is older now than ABBA’s “SOS” was when “Ms. Jackson” came out, so Outkast is mainstream rock these days.
I completely lost my train of thought. Oh, right, an 0-2 fastball.
The first pitch of this at-bat was a sweep down the stretch, so Cole’s timing was almost entirely cooked by this point. The ball almost went past him when he started swinging.
He’s probably been waiting for a big moment since Ohtani’s last start. Well, I’m getting there.
Ohtani closed the fifth inning by getting Jose Altuve to swing 3.23 feet from the center of home plate, making it the most powerful home run by a righty in less than four years.
This is obviously a bad swing, not only because the ball is too far from the plate, but who is swinging the belt. I mean, there is a precedent for this.
But don’t forget, Altuve and Ohtani were team rivals for six years. Altuve has more regular season at-bats against Ohtani than any other hitter. Of course he of all people knows not to swing in a certain area, which is to say, about two-thirds of Altuve from the middle of the plate.
Let’s play along with Altuve for a second. That wild pitch was the sixth pitch of the at-bat. He has played badly in the last three.
He tries to protect the outside corner of the plate from a 101 mph fastball in the black, which was the last play he saw.
He knew how to swing because at 1-0, he took another quick ball in the outside corner, maybe thinking he was sweeping, he was drunk on hitting.
And between those two places, he found this.
A sweeper who was miles away from the plate. Altuve was fooled, but he got on the field and was able to mark it with the end of the at bat. Why didn’t he think that he could come to another sweeper when it came?
Altuve may have looked foolish in the end, but I can see where he’s coming from. And I sympathize; hitting Ohtani is a tough assignment right now. It’s more difficult, it turns out, than finding something new to say about him.
