Ohtani’s 438‑ft blast

Shohei Ohtani started the day with a warning shot. In the third inning at Nationals Park on Sunday, he drove a Foster Griffin pitch 438 feet to straightaway center, a ball hit 114.6 mph off the bat. It gave the Dodgers a 1-0 lead. A few innings later, that swing looked like a footnote. By the time the game ended, it looked like the hinge. The Dodgers did not spend this series looking tidy. They spent it looking dangerous. Washington erased Ohtani’s early lead almost immediately when Luis García Jr. hit a two-run homer off Roki Sasaki in the bottom of the third. An inning later, the Nationals kept pressing. Sasaki walked CJ Abrams. Abrams stole second. A soft grounder by Keibert Ruiz took a nasty bounce off first base and skipped over Freddie Freeman for an RBI single. James Wood added a two-run homer, and suddenly Los Angeles was down 6-1. That was the uncomfortable part of the afternoon. Sasaki, one start after allowing one run in his season debut, gave up a career-high six earned runs in five innings. Some of it was bad luck. Some of it was not. He walked three, left a four-seamer up to García, and watched the game tilt hard against him. The rain did not help. First pitch came after a delay of two hours and nine minutes, which made the whole day feel unstable before Sasaki even threw one. That is why the comeback mattered. It was not just a highlight. It was an answer to a problem the Dodgers may have to keep solving in April. Their starter did not dominate. Their bullpen still had to cover the last four innings. So the lineup had to reverse the game. It began in the sixth, when Dalton Rushing hit a two-run homer to cut the deficit to 6-3. That swing changed the pace. Washington’s lead stopped feeling safe. The eighth inning finished the job. Los Angeles scored four times. Santiago Espinal lined a two-run single that tied the game. Kyle Tucker followed with a run-scoring forceout that pushed the Dodgers ahead. Ohtani then lifted a sacrifice fly that made it 8-6. He had opened the scoring with the loudest swing of the day and closed the rally with the calmest one, which is a good description of what makes him so exhausting for opponents. He does not need every big moment to look spectacular. He just keeps owning them. The sweep sharpened the meaning of it all. The Dodgers left Washington at 7-2 after winning three straight in the series. This was already their fifth comeback win of the young season, and their biggest from a deficit since April 2, 2025, when they also came back from five down. Early-season records can lie. Repeated escape acts usually do not. They tell you a team can survive a bad start, a crooked inning, a delayed afternoon, and still make the last meaningful contact. On Sunday, that first contact belonged to Ohtani, and it traveled 438 feet into the center-field seats.