If you crossed “see the Dodgers in the World Series” off your bucket list last year, here’s a bucket list update for you: See the Dodgers in the World Series, from the comfort of a hotel room with a full view of the field.
Not at Dodger Stadium, of course. In Toronto, however, where a hotel is built into the ballpark and 55 rooms allow you to open the curtains and catch the game without a ticket.
During the World Series, the nightly rate for these rooms starts at $3,999 (in Canadian dollars, or about $2,850 in U.S. dollars).
A view of the field from one of the rooms at the Toronto Marriott City Centre.
You have to get to Toronto, and that costs a lot of money too. But you don’t need to pay separately for game tickets and a hotel, and you can get room service instead of standing in line at concession stands.
The rooms include chairs that face the field, so you don’t have to stand on your bed to catch the action. And you never know: a player could toss you a ball during batting practice, right through your window. Take a look:
Two days ago, Shohei Ohtani rolled into Dodger Stadium as a man on a mission.
After struggling for the previous couple weeks — mired in a postseason slump that had raised questions about everything from his out-of-sync swing mechanics to the physical toll of his two-way duties — the soon-to-be four-time MVP decided it was time to change something up.
Over the previous seven games, going back to the start of the National League Division Series, the $700-million man had looked nothing like himself. Ohtani had two hits in 25 at-bats. He’d recorded 12 strikeouts and plenty more puzzling swing decisions. And he seemed, in the estimation of some around the team, unusually perturbed as public criticisms of his play started to mount.
So, during the team’s off-day workout Wednesday at Dodger Stadium, ahead of Game 3 of the NL Championship Series, Ohtani informed the club’s hitting coaches he wanted to take batting practice on the field.
It was a change from his normal routine — and signaled his growing urgency to get back on track.
“If this was a regular-season situation and you’re looking at an expanse of small sample — eight, nine games, whatever it might be — he probably wouldn’t be out on the field,” manager Dave Roberts said later.
But “with the urgency [of] the postseason,” the manager continued, Ohtani “wanted to make an adjustment on his own.”
Whatever Ohtani found that day, evidently (and resoundingly) clicked. He led off Game 3 with a triple. He entered Game 4 looking more comfortable with his swing. And then, in one of the incredible individual displays ever witnessed in playoff history, he lifted the Dodgers straight into the World Series.
In a 5-1 defeat of the Milwaukee Brewers that completed an NLCS sweep and gave the Dodgers their 26th pennant in franchise history, Ohtani hit three home runs as a hitter, and struck out 10 batters over six-plus scoreless innings as a pitcher.
Shohei Ohtani pitches during Game 4 of the NLCS against the Brewers. Ohtani struck out 10 over six scoreless innings for the Dodgers.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
He made his previously disappointing playoffs a suddenly forgotten memory, earning NLCS MVP honors and to the astonished amazement of all 52,883 in attendance.
And he delivered the kind of game the baseball world dreamed about when the two-way phenom first arrived from Japan, fulfilling the prophecy that accompanied him as a near-mythical prospect eight years earlier.
Back then, Ohtani’s 100-mph fastball and wicked off-speed repertoire had tantalized evaluators. His majestic left-handed swing had tortured pitchers in his home country.
Not since Babe Ruth had the sport seen anything like him.
There were some early growing pains (and injuries) during his transition to the majors. But over the last five years, he blossomed in the game’s definitive face.
A look at the three home runs Shohei Ohtani hit in Game 4 of the NLCS on Friday.
All that had been missing, in a resume chock full of MVPs and All-Star selections and unthinkable records even “The Great Bambino” never produced, was a signature performance in October. A game in which he dominated on the mound, thrilled at the plate, and single-handedly transformed a game on the sport’s biggest stage.
During that Wednesday workout this week, Ohtani got himself ready for one, stepping into the cage during his on-field batting practice — as his walk-up song played through the stadium speakers and teammates gathered near the dugout in curious anticipation — and swatting one home run after another, including one that soared to the roof of the right-field pavilion.
On Friday, in an almost unimaginable showcase of his unprecedented talents, he managed to do exactly the same thing.
After stranding a leadoff walk in the top of the first with three-straight strikeouts, Ohtani switched from pitcher to hitter and unleashed a hellacious swing. Brewers starter José Quintana left him an inside slurve. Ohtani turned it into the first leadoff home run ever by a pitcher (in the regular season or playoffs). The ball traveled 446 feet. It landed high up the right-field stands.
Three more scoreless innings of pitching work later, Ohtani came back to the plate and hit his second home run of the night even farther. In a swing almost identical to his titanic BP drive two days prior, he launched a ball that darn near clipped the pavilion roof again, a 469-foot moonshot that landed in the concourse above the seats in right.
Somehow, there was still plenty more to come.
With the Dodgers up 4-0 at that point, Ohtani then did his best work as a pitcher, following up two strikeouts that stranded a leadoff double in the fourth — and had him excitedly fist-pumping off the mound — with two more in both the fifth and the sixth.
His fastball was humming up to triple-digits. His sweeper and cutter were keeping the Brewers off balance. His splitter wasn’t touched once any of the five times they tried to swing at it.
Shohei Ohtani runs the bases after hitting his third home run of the game against the Brewers in Game 4 of the NLCS at Dodger Stadium on Friday night.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Anything he did immediately became magic.
Ohtani’s loudest roar came in the bottom of the seventh, after his pitching start had ended on a walk and a single led off the top half of the inning.
For the third time, he flung his bat at a pitch over the plate. He sent a fly ball sailing deep in a mild autumn night. He rounded the bases as landed beyond the center field fence.
Three home runs. Six immaculate innings. A tour de force that sent the Dodgers to the World Series.
All of it, just two days removed from Ohtani being seemingly at his lowest.
All of it, when the baseball world was most closely watching.
Dodgers players and coaches celebrate after sweeping the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS at Dodger Stadium on Friday night.
At 5:37 p.m. Wednesday, Michael Buble’s “Feeling Good” blared from the Dodger Stadium speakers.
Shohei Ohtani came strolling to the plate with a bat in his hands.
There was no one in the stands, of course. Nor an opposing pitcher on the mound. The Dodgers, on this workout day after returning from Milwaukee, were still some 22 hours away from resuming their National League Championship Series against the Brewers. For any other player, it would have been a routine affair.
Ohtani, however, is not just any player.
And among the many things that make him unique, his habit of almost never taking batting practice on the field is one of the small but notable ones.
Which made his decision to do so Wednesday a telling development.
Over the last two weeks, Ohtani has been in a slump. Since the start of the NL Division Series, he is just two-for-25 with a whopping 12 strikeouts. He has been smothered by left-handed pitching. He has made poor swing decisions and failed to slug the ball.
Last week, manager Dave Roberts went so far as to say the Dodgers were “not gonna win the World Series with that sort of performance” from their $700-million slugger.
Thus, out Ohtani came for batting practice on Wednesday in the most visible sign yet of his urgency for a turnaround.
“The other way to say it is that, if I hit, we will win,” Ohtani said in Japanese when asked about Roberts’ World Series quote earlier Wednesday afternoon. “I think he thinks that if I hit, we will win. I’d like to do my best to do that.”
In Roberts’ view, Ohtani has already started improving from his woeful NLDS, when he struck out nine times in 18 trips to the plate against a left-handed-heavy Philadelphia Phillies staff that, as president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman emphatically put it, had “the most impressive execution against a hitter I’ve ever seen.”
In Game 1 of the NLCS against the Brewers, Ohtani was 0-for-two but walked three times; twice intentionally but another on a more disciplined five-pitch at-bat to lead off the game against left-handed opener Aaron Ashby.
The following night, he went only one-for-five with three more strikeouts, giving him 15 this postseason, second-most in the playoffs. But he did have an RBI single, marking his first run driven in since Game 2 of the NLDS. He followed that with a steal, swiping his first bag of the playoffs. And earlier in the game, he scorched a lineout to right at 115.2 mph, the hardest he’d hit a ball since taking Cincinnati Reds pitcher Hunter Greene deep in the team’s postseason opener.
“The first two games in Milwaukee, his at-bats have been fantastic,” Roberts said Wednesday, before heading out to the field and watching Ohtani’s impromptu BP session.
“That’s what I’ve been looking for. That’s what I’m counting on,” he added, while noting the careful approach the Brewers have also taken with the soon-to-be four-time MVP. “You can only take what they give you. So for me, I think he’s in a good spot right now.”
Shohei Ohtani puts the ball in play in the third inning during Game 4 of the NLDS.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Ohtani’s overall numbers, of course, continue to suggest otherwise. His .147 postseason batting average is second-worst on the team, ahead of only Andy Pages. His seven-game drought without an extra-base hit is longer than any he endured in the regular season.
“The first thing I have to do is increase the level of my at-bats,” Ohtani said in Japanese. “Swing at strikes and not swing at balls.”
On Wednesday, Ohtani’s slump also led to questions about his role as a two-way player, and whether his return to pitching this season (and, this October, doing it for the first time in the playoffs) has contributed to his sudden struggles at the plate.
After all, on days Ohtani pitched this season, he hit .222 with four home runs but 21 strikeouts. On the days immediately following an outing, he batted .147 with two home runs and 10 strikeouts.
His current slump began with a hitless, four-strikeout dud in Game 1 of the NLDS, when he also made a six-inning, three-run start on the mound.
And in days since, Roberts has acknowledged some likely correlation between Ohtani’s two roles.
“[His offense] hasn’t been good when he’s pitched,” Roberts said following the NLDS. “We’ve got to think through this and come up with a better game plan.”
Ohtani, on the other hand, pushed back somewhat on that narrative during Wednesday’s workout, in which he also threw a bullpen session in preparation for his next start in Game 4 of the NLCS on Friday.
While it is “more physically strenuous” to handle both roles, he conceded, he countered that “I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation.”
“Physically,” he added, “I don’t feel like there’s a connection.”
Instead, Ohtani on Wednesday went about fixing his swing the way any other normal hitter would. He went out on the field for his rare session of batting practice. Of his 32 swings, he sent 14 over the fence, including one that clanked off the roof of the right-field pavilion.
“Certainly, there’s frustration,” Roberts said of how he’s seen Ohtani handle his uncharacteristic lack of performance.
But, he added, “that’s expected. I don’t mind it. I like the edge.”
“He’s obviously a very, very talented player, and we’re counting on him,” Roberts continued. “He’s just a great competitor. He’s very prepared. And there’s still a lot of baseball left.”
