Shohei Ohtani: Angels' two-way phenom in control as he wins MLB pitching debut

John Hickey | Special for USA TODAY Sports

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OAKLAND – Shohei Ohtani came to meet the media Sunday with a new friend – the game ball from his first Major League victory.

He’d thrown 92 pitches and six innings of the Angels’ 7-4 win over Oakland and he wanted the game ball, badly it seemed, although he didn’t say so. He’d collected the ball from his first big league hit when he was the Angels’ DH Thursday and gave that to his parents. They aren’t getting this one though. At least not yet.

“I’ll have to think about it,” he said when asked where the ball was going.

With the exception of a couple of his 92 pitches, Ohtani seemed to have a vivid clarity about where his ball was going Sunday. Matt Chapman crushed a three-run homer in the second inning to give the A’s a 3-2 lead, but that was the only inning in which Oakland got a hit off Ohtani as he retired 14 of the final 15 men he faced.

“Major League hitters hit the ball,” manager Mike Scioscia said of Ohtani’s second-inning woes. “Outside of that one stretch of three hitters in the second inning, that’s about as well as you can pitch.

“He finished strong in the fifth and sixth; he carried his stuff through 90-plus pitches. We expected it, but it’s good that he got to that marker. He felt good after 92, and I’m sure he had a little bit more in him.”

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Maybe. He came off the field after the sixth patting his chest. The A’s Khris Davis had just missed a hanging splitter and popped it up.

“It was a one-run game, last thing I wanted to do was give up the big fly and tie the game,” Ohtani said through a translator. “I had two strikes and I hung it. When I released it, I thought it was going to be a home run. I was pretty lucky right there.”

Ohtani sat at 98 mph for most of his six innings. He hit 100 mph twice, and one of those, a Stephen Piscotty single in front of Chapman’s third inning homer, was hit well. For the most part, however, the A’s looked as if they hadn’t seen him before. And, of course they hadn’t, since the 23-year-old is in the U.S. for the first time after playing in Japan.

“I thought he had really good stuff,” Chapman said. “Luckily he just left that one over the plate. I think he might have been a little excited early and some of those pitches were up in the zone. But he kind of settled down and his split-finger started playing off his fastball. It was hard to pick up.”

Ohtani, who’d made his big league batting debut with a 1-for-5 game against the A’s on Thursday, became the first player since 1920 to both start separate games as a hitter and as a pitcher when at 1:13 p.m. PT he threw a 96-mph fastball for a strike to the A’s Marcus Semien.

Much is made of a comparison of Ohtani to Babe Ruth, the most famous combination hitter/pitcher in the sport’s history. But the last players to start games both as a hitter and a pitcher in the first 10 games of a season were the Red Sox’s Joe Bush and the Dodgers’ Clarence Mitchell at the start of the 1920 season. Ruth made 143 of his 147 career starts between 1914-19.

Plans are still unclear as to how often Ohtani will hit, but based on Sunday, finding room for him in the Angels’ rotation will be no problem whatsoever. Scioscia said over the weekend that he didn’t see a problem with Ohtani batting on a day he throws between starts so he could get a couple of games, probably as the DH, in between starts, depending on schedules and matchups.

During spring training, Ohtani pitched in just two Cactus League games with a 27.00 ERA, and even when he was throwing in minor league, intrasquad and B games, he’d never thrown more than 85 pitches. On Sunday he had 84 pitches through five innings, but with the Angels holding just a 4-3 lead at the time, Scioscia wasn’t hesitant to send Ohtani out to pitch the sixth.

By that time the Angels had reclaimed the lead on an RBI double from Mike Trout and subsequent sacrifice fly from Justin Upton in the fifth. The lead would hold at 4-3 until Ohtani was long since out of the game. The Angels tacked on three runs in the seventh and the A’s weren’t able to do much until scoring once and loading the bases with one out in the ninth before Keynan Middleton got the last two outs.