The way the World Baseball Classic ended on Tuesday night almost felt scripted. The two best players in baseball, Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, who also happen to be teammates, going mano e mano in a 3-2 game in the bottom of the ninth. If it were a movie you wouldn't have believed it.
This extremely rare circumstance led to an extremely rare moment: Trout striking out. Despite baseball becoming a swing-for-the-fences or swing-and-miss game, Trout is the type of exceptional player who still keeps his SO count down at the plate. But Ohtani brought his best stuff, feeding Trout a heavy diet of 100-mph fastballs before finishing him off with a 87-mph slider out of the zone that Trout waved at.
Throughout the at-bat, Trout didn't even foul a pitch off. He swung and missed three times, something he literally almost never does. Check out this utterly insane stat that makes Ohtani's game-winning K 10 times more impressive than it already was:
That is ... absurd? But also totally believable and 100 percent true. You simply don't get Trout to swing and miss three times in the same at-bat. And somehow Ohtani did it on one of the biggest baseball stages in recent memory. Trout at his best is still by far the No. 1 player in baseball, but Ohtani has quickly become No. 1B.
That calls to mind this hilarious tweet that never gets old and, unfortunately, will probably get a lot more run in 2023 unless the Los Angeles Angels decide to finally get their head out of their ass and make a postseason appearance:
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