Shohei Ohtani on Sat, Jul 25, 2026

Two clean hits with zero sharp stuff faced show Ohtani's contact skills are intact

Ohtani went 2-for-4 with one RBI, no home runs, and one strikeout in today's game against the Mets. Measured against his season averages of a .286 batting average and a .919 OPS, this was a solid, contact-driven outing rather than a power display. He is still searching for his next home run, but the underlying quality of contact was clearly intact today, and the RBI single kept his production line moving even without leaving the yard.

Looking at the pitch mix, the Mets battery leaned heavily on the four-seam fastball (36% of pitches, 93.8 mph average, 63% strike rate), while mixing in a sinker that landed for a strike on every single pitch and a sweeper that found the zone 80% of the time. Ohtani was fooled for a swinging strike only twice on the four-seam and once on a slurve, which suggests the Mets never really put him in a defensive position with anything sharp or well-located. His season-long platoon splits back this up: he is hitting .289 with a .932 OPS and 13 home runs against right-handed pitchers, compared to .279 with an .892 OPS and 9 home runs against left-handers. Facing mostly hard, straightforward stuff over quality secondary pitches today played right into that established strength, and it shows in how comfortably he squared the ball up.

Over his last ten games, Ohtani has not gone deep since July 13, with several 0-for-4 and 1-for-4 nights sprinkled in since July 18, a stretch that looked like a mild cold spell for a hitter of his caliber. Today's two-hit, one-RBI performance looks like the start of a turnaround rather than a one-off. Unicorn's take: the barrel control and plate discipline are clearly still there, so it should only be a matter of time before the power numbers catch back up with the contact quality he showed tonight.