LOS ANGELES -- Griffin Canning was hardly in grave danger when Shohei Ohtani stepped to the plate in the fifth inning Wednesday at Dodger Stadium, but with the way Canning was pitching, it was the thorniest spot he had faced all night: Ohtani batting with a man on base in a three-run game. If the Dodgers were going to make things difficult, this was their chance.
Canning ran the count full before throwing Ohtani a changeup that appeared headed straight toward him, until it faded back over the inside corner of the zone. Home-plate umpire Jansen Visconti signaled strike three on the reigning National League MVP. Ohtani retreated to the dugout.
The Dodgers never wound up making much additional noise in a 6-1 Mets win, which clinched the season series for New York.
A significant reason why the Mets have won four of six against the defending World Series champions has been their ability to neutralize Ohtani, almost certainly one of the two most dangerous hitters in the game today. Against the rest of the league, Ohtani is batting .301/.399/.671. Against the Mets, his slash line is .208/.286/.458.
“As a whole,” said Monday’s Mets starter, Paul Blackburn, “I feel like we’ve pitched him really well.”
Thanks in part to his success against Ohtani, Canning finished with his finest stat line of the season over six shutout innings. Pete Alonso hit two homers and drove home five runs to back him, giving the Mets their breeziest win over the Dodgers so far.
Ohtani, meanwhile, went 2-for-4 with a pair of harmless singles, which the Mets will take any day of the week. While he does have two solo homers in six games against the Mets this season, their pitchers are fine with that, as well. Solo homers tend not to lose games.
Instead, the Mets want to avoid the type of tension that could have occurred in the fifth inning, had Ohtani managed to trim their three-run margin to one. At that point in the proceedings, Alonso had not yet hit his second home run, a Statcast-projected 447-foot blast in the eighth that put the game on ice. So when Canning fell behind Ohtani, 3-1, on four consecutive sliders, Dodger Stadium began to simmer.
The next pitch was also a slider that appeared to miss the outside corner, but Visconti called it a strike. Finally, with the count full, Canning threw one of his best-placed pitches of the night to freeze Ohtani.
“I don’t want to give in,” Canning said of the at-bat. “He put a good swing on a fastball earlier in the game. He’s a great fastball hitter, so I was leaning on my slider to get there and then just kind of showed him something different with the changeup 3-2.”
Having played alongside Ohtani in Anaheim from 2019-23, Canning knows him better than most. He said the key to neutralizing the slugger is mixing things up “every time you face him.”
“I think they’re really not throwing fastballs in the hitting zone,” was how Dodgers manager Dave Roberts put it. “If something is in the strike zone, it’s spin or changeup, and they’re changing a lot of locations -- they’re going in, crowding him, going away. They’re just not repeating a lot.”
Sometimes, achieving such a thing can be easier said than done. At Dodger Stadium in particular, Ohtani’s at-bats are events. His walk-up music, Michael Bublé’s “Feeling Good,” tends to froth up the crowd. Fans hang on every pitch, knowing Ohtani’s violent swings can cause damage at any moment.
Mets pitchers understand all that, too, but they do their best to make “the outside noise fade away,” as Tylor Megill put it.
Rather than focus on the spectacle, the Mets pitch to their strengths. For Blackburn on Monday, that meant attacking Ohtani with hard stuff up-and-in and soft stuff down-and-away -- strategies gleaned from more than a dozen matchups with Ohtani in the American League West. For Megill on Tuesday, it meant trying to be unpredictable, such as when he froze Ohtani on a strike-three fastball after jumping ahead of him, 1-2 -- a clear offspeed count in which most pitchers would try to tempt him to chase.
“There is a secret sauce,” Megill said. “There’s a secret sauce to every hitter.”
Asked about their success against Ohtani before Canning’s victory on Wednesday, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza superstitiously laughed off the question, quipping that “we’ve got two more games.”
Now, it’s down to one, with the season series over the Dodgers secure.
“Every team is going to have a plan, right? But it comes down to the players going out there and executing, and I feel like we’ve done that,” Mendoza said. “He’s still a great hitter. It’s not comfortable watching him over there at the plate. But so far, knock on wood, I feel like we’ve done a good job.”