Shohei Ohtani Adds “Little League Home Run” To His Résumé

It came in the top of the eighth, with the Dodgers already ahead of the Angels on Saturday night by four. Shohei Ohtani walked to the plate with two outs but runners on first and second, thanks to a Max Muncy single and an Alex Call walk. On the second pitch, Ohtani looped the ball off the end of his bat, the baseball dropping just inside the line then bouncing off the ground and over the wall. Ground-rule double, right?

Except the ball didn't go into the stands. It hit the netting that now sits atop the wall and bounded back onto the field. That netting is new, the Associated Press reported, added to Angel Stadium this year. (This is as good a time as any to pause and remember that netting is good—it makes going to baseball games safer for fans.)

So was it out of play? Or a live ball? On the replay, you can see Angels right fielder Jo Adell, a noted home run thief, throwing his arms in the air, signaling the former. The broadcast team for ESPN thought the same, at first believing the ball had gone into the seats until it became clear that it had not. Because the moment felt so much like that routine ground-rule double, the broadcast didn't stay on Ohtani for long, necessitating a sudden zooming out of the camera to capture his sprint toward home and easy slide into the plate.

A good explanation for what happened came from Orel Hershiser on the Dodgers broadcast. Hershiser said he talked to replay officials in New York who explained that, because the netting was flush to wall, it was considered an extension of the wall. This meant the ball was still in play, as if the ball had hit the wall itself. However, if the ball had hit different netting, say behind a camera well or behind a dugout, it would have been considered out of play.

Officially the play was recorded as a triple with a throwing error by Adell, hence the phrase Little League home run—because something like that is far more likely to happen in Little League.

Like with a lot of sports, your takeaway from this series of events will vary based on your viewpoint. For fans of the Dodgers or Ohtani, it became another reminder of his excellence, of what makes him the standout player of his generation. If you're an Angels fan, it was another bad break in what has been years of relentless misery—including six seasons with Ohtani, in which the team never made the playoffs—leading up to this year's current position at the bottom of the American League West. There's truth in the old sports cliché "you never know which way the ball will bounce." But with the Angels, it's probably badly.