Ohtani keeps crushing it

Shohei Ohtani’s latest home run mattered because it made the early-season noise around the Dodgers look silly. On Monday, April 6, he took Joe Mantiply deep in the sixth inning at Rogers Centre, a 413-foot shot to center that pushed Los Angeles further ahead in a 14-2 win over Toronto. It was Ohtani’s third homer in four games, and it came inside a five-homer avalanche that turned a marquee World Series rematch into a rout (mlb.com, espn.com). That swing looks even bigger when you put it next to where the Dodgers were a week ago. Through their first six games, they had scored only 23 runs, enough to trigger the usual April panic about timing and chemistry. Then they went to Washington and Toronto and started bludgeoning baseballs again. MLB’s own recap noted that Los Angeles had scored 45 runs through its first four road games, the most any team had done that early in a road schedule since 1900. Ohtani’s bat was not the whole story, but it was the clearest sign that the lineup had snapped back into shape (mlb.com, mlb.com). The streak really began on April 3 in Washington. Ohtani’s first homer of the season was a three-run blast off Miles Mikolas that tied the game in the third inning, and the Dodgers went on to win 13-6. Two days later, he homered again in an 8-6 comeback win that completed a sweep of the Nationals. By the time he left the yard in Toronto on Monday, the shape of the week was obvious: the Dodgers had stopped waiting for their offense to arrive and had simply overpowered three straight opponents (mlb.com, apnews.com, msn.com). Toronto helped make the point by collapsing in every direction at once. Max Scherzer lasted only two innings in Monday’s game, the Blue Jays lost their fifth straight, and by the ninth inning they had catcher Tyler Heineman on the mound just to get the night over with. Ohtani’s home run landed in the middle of that unraveling, not as a solo highlight but as part of a lineup-wide demonstration that the Dodgers can still make elite opponents look ordinary when the order starts chaining together quality at-bats (espn.com, mlb.com). Elsewhere in the National League, the Pittsburgh Pirates offered a different version of early-season momentum. The card’s score was off: the Pirates did not beat the Reds 5-3 in the game tied to this storyline. On April 1, they beat Cincinnati 8-3 behind Paul Skenes and a three-run homer from Oneil Cruz, who finished that series with three home runs and six RBIs. That mattered because Cincinnati had opened hot, and Pittsburgh still walked into Great American Ball Park and took the series anyway. In April, that is how standings start to bend: not through grand conclusions, but through a few loud swings that make a week feel different than it did before first pitch (espn.com, mlb.com).