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The story
The Dodgers rallied to beat the Pirates 4-3, extending their winning streak to five games. Starter Tarik Skubal, making his first appearance since being traded to the team, earned his first win with 11 strikeouts over 7 innings on 106 pitches, while Shohei Ohtani went hitless in three at-bats with two walks.
The thread debated the relative value of walks versus hits, trading numbers back and forth over Ohtani’s batting average with runners in scoring position and his OPS in close-and-late situations.
Published 8/23 (Sun) 10:59 — TBS NEWS DIG, Powered by JNN
■MLB: Dodgers 4-3 Pirates (Dodger Stadium, August 23 Japan time)
The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani (32) started at home against the Pirates, batting leadoff as DH. He went hitless in three at-bats with two walks and two strikeouts. Starter Tarik Skubal (29) allowed three runs in the first inning, but the Dodgers closed to within one run in the 4th on back-to-back RBI hits from Teoscar Hernández (33) and A. Thomas (26). In the 5th, a two-run RBI hit from Kyle Tucker (29) put the Dodgers ahead for good. Skubal shut out the Pirates from the 2nd inning on, throwing 7 innings on 106 pitches with 5 hits allowed, 11 strikeouts, 1 walk, and 3 runs (3 earned) to pick up his first win since joining the team, as the Dodgers claimed their fifth straight win.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
(∪^ω^) 🔔♪ Ding-dong, ding-dong♪ (a running 5ch gag where a real museum bell "rings" to celebrate round-numbered posts in a thread)
It's been like this all year.
No way you three-peat with that crew.
Rotation's Yamamoto, Ohtani, Skubal, Snell, and Glasnow if he's still got it.
Sasaki closes.
If Sasaki's not cutting it, they'll throw Yamamoto in as closer too and run him into the ground.
That's probably what that garbage manager is thinking.
Couldn't be more obvious they've given up on chasing any titles.
Bet they're desperately digging up some weird stat again.
Don't you get it — two walks are worth the same as two hits?
So what, four walks equal a home run now? lol
That rice ball commercial looks super AI-generated — is that even really him?
2nd (1B) F. Freeman OPS .842
3rd (CF) A. Pages OPS .805
4th (3B) M. Muncy OPS .846
5th (SS) M. Betts OPS .674
6th (RF) K. Tucker OPS .705
7th (2B) T. Edman OPS ~.740
8th (LF) T. Hernández OPS ~.750
9th (C) H. Feduccia OPS under .500
Rather than demanding more out of Ohtani, isn't the real takeaway that everyone else needs to step it up a bit?
Besides Ohtani, Muncy, and Freeman, everyone else looks shaky.
A walk doesn't drive in a run unless the bases are loaded though? lol
That's exactly what I said from the start — a walk isn't equal to a real hit, it's equal to a cheap "roach hit" (5ch slang for a weak infield squibber that just barely sneaks through).
And with the bases loaded or a runner on first, a roach hit doesn't even count as a hit — it turns into a force-out.
So technically, a walk is worth slightly more than a roach hit.
That logic's gotta sting for the guys who've been worshipping that stat.
Ohtani's ranked 109th out of 137 qualified players in Late & Close situations lol
Funny thing though.
Weren't people chanting "batting average with runners in scoring position, batting average with runners in scoring position" like a broken record the last two years?
So what was his Late & Close split those years, then?
Background and Key Points
5ch’s Entertainment & Sports News+ board is one of Japan’s largest anonymous forums, and MLB threads there draw heavy traffic specifically because of Ohtani, whose every plate appearance is treated as a referendum on his season. Ohtani plays as a “two-way” player only in the sense that he still hits every day as DH while rehabbing back into pitching; this particular game shows him purely as a hitter going 0-for-3 with two walks, which is why the discussion centers entirely on batting production rather than pitching. Skubal’s start matters separately: he’s a front-line starter who had thrown for another organization before this season and was making his first outing in a Dodgers uniform, so an 11-strikeout, one-run-after-the-first performance was treated as an early answer to whether the trade was worth it.
The actual fault line in the thread is not “is Ohtani struggling” — everyone agrees he went hitless — but whether a walk should count as equivalent production to a hit. Posters split between citing OPS and RISP/late-and-close splits to argue Ohtani’s plate discipline still has value, and others mocking that equivalence, arguing a walk without runners in position to score is worth less than even a weak infield single.
What the thread never addresses is sample size: late-and-close OPS and RISP averages over a few weeks are notoriously volatile statistics that fluctuate wildly for any hitter, including elite ones, and posters cite specific split numbers as though they were stable season-defining traits rather than small-sample noise.
This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Entertainment & Sports News+) thread “[Then Again, Ohtani…] Dodgers rally for their 5th straight win! Starter Skubal dazzles with 11 K’s for his first win since the trade — Shohei Ohtani goes hitless.”
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