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"Thinking Inside the Box" is an occasional Newsletter feature that pulls topics from a reading of the box scores. The lines in fixed-width are the player's box score line for the game in question.
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Dodgers 20, Marlins 4
AB R H BI
Ohtani DH 6 4 6 10 3 HR
“Thinking Inside the Box” pays tribute to a time when newspaper box scores were a primary connection to the world of baseball. I’d devour them, sometimes in two papers (we were a tabloid family, the Daily News and the Post) a day, learning who the stars were on teams that were largely rumors to me. I’d clip them and bring them to Wiffle ball games to play as the Cardinals or Angels or Astros...”now batting, Denny Walling!”
Come to baseball this way, and you learn to appreciate box score lines the same way you do a sliding catch or a double into the gap. They have aesthetics, they have artistic qualities, they have meaning beyond the numbers.
Box score lines don’t reduce a player’s performance to numbers, they illustrate the player’s performance with numbers. 6 4 6 10 is something you sit with quietly, a baseball Renoir or Rembrandt, created by a genius not for you to understand, but to appreciate, to admire, to bask in. It’s unique; we’d seen 6 3 6 12 and 6 4 5 10 and 6 5 6 10, but across the sweep of recorded baseball history, never a 6 4 6 10. Ohtani’s box score line Thursday is his “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” his “Guernica,” his “Dogs Playing Poker.”
HR: Ohtani 3 (51)
Then again, numbers fall short sometimes. In the ninth inning of yesterday’s game, with the Marlins just trying to get things over with, they let infielder Vidal Brujan pitch to Ohtani. It wasn’t a good matchup for Brujan, who fell behind Ohtani 2-0 while pumping 74. Brujan dialed it back to 68, middle-up, and Ohtani opened both a can of whoop-ass and the 51/51 Club all at once with a 440-foot homer. The last time anything like that homer was launched in South Florida, Boeing stranded two people in space.
SB: Ohtani 2 (51)
Let it be noted that the 50/50 Club never technically existed. Ohtani stole his 50th base, third base, on the front end of a double steal in the first inning, then his 51st, second base, an inning later. The 48/51 Club established, Ohtani set about creating new spaces with his homers in the sixth, eighth, and ninth, and he came a few Dodger baserunners short of getting a chance at christening the 52/51 Club before leaving town.
In addition to everything else he’s doing, Ohtani is posting one of the most efficient volume basestealing seasons of all time.
“I am an exceptional thief!” (Best SB% in a 50-steal season)
SB CS SB%
Max Carey PIT 1922 51 2 96.2
Jacoby Ellsbury BOS 2013 52 4 92.9
Shohei Ohtani LAD 2024 51 4 92.7
Corbin Carroll ARI 2023 54 5 91.5
Jerry Mumphrey SDP 1980 52 5 91.2
TB: Ohtani 17
Seven years into his career, Ohtani is still carving out new space in the record books. Not getting that final AB yesterday left him short of the single-game record for total bases, 19, held by another lefty-hitting Dodger, Shawn Green. Ohtani’s 17 leaves him in a four-way tie for fourth with legends like Mike Schmidt, Gil Hodges, and...Scooter Gennett. Ohtani was posting numbers so quickly that my eighth-inning observation that he was the first player to ever have two homers, two doubles, and two steals in a single game was quickly mooted by his becoming the only player to have three homers and two steals in a single game.
When the dust settled, OptaSTATS had the final word.
Was it the greatest game ever played? I don’t care. It was a fairly meaningless getaway-day contest against a team that’s quit and had a shortstop on the mound in the ninth inning. You can make a case that Ohtani himself has had greater games, days on which he struck out ten men while hitting two homers, or threw seven shutout innings and then helped key the game-winning rally in the eighth. It may not have been his greatest game at LoanDepot Park.
6 4 6 10 exists on a plane apart from our measurement tools, something not to be graded or ranked, but to be stared at in a quiet room from six feet away, appreciated like a sculpture or photograph or, yes, a painting. It’s baseball art, crafted by the greatest artist of his time.
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Today’s key games:
7:05 ET: Tigers (TBD, probably opener/Brant Hurter) at Orioles (Burnes)
7:10 ET: Twins (Festa) at Red Sox (Fitts)
7:10 ET: Phillies (Sanchez) at Mets (Peterson)
8:10 ET: Diamondbacks (Gallen) at Brewers (Rea)
