How Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani’s hitting has somehow improved over his 2024 MVP season

It’s hard, you know, raising the bar when the bar is as high as Shohei Ohtani’s. And yet, we’re more than a quarter of the way through the 2025 season and the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ superstar has done just that at the plate. 

As the reigning champions face inconsistency and injuries in the rotation and a brutal field in the National League West, Ohtani’s high level of production from the DH spot has again been the foundation for L.A. How high? To repeat the premise, he’s been better on a rate-basis than he was in his MVP season of 2024, which was one of the great individual offensive campaigns of this era. The good news for Ohtani and the Dodgers is that Ohtani has upped his game not only in terms of top-line, back-of-the-baseball-card numbers, but also when it comes to quality-of-contact indicators that do a capable job of predicting sustainability of performance. No, the margins by which he’s improved aren’t huge – how could they be given how strong his 2024 was – but they’re notable just the same. As such, let’s now undertake a brief walking tour of those two facets of Ohtani’s age-30 season to date. 

The baseball-card numbers

Let’s say at the outset that is going to be a very modern baseball card, festooned in part with advanced metrics. You’ll be fine. First, let’s hit the rate-based numbers for purposes of direct comparison between 2025 and 2024: 

To repeat, the differences aren’t major, but Ohtani – freshly into his third decade of human existence – has upped his offensive game ever so slightly relative to last season. As for the two more advanced metrics, OPS+ is OPS expressed as a percentage of the league-average OPS and then adjusted for a hitter’s home ballpark. The above means that Ohtani’s park-adjusted OPS this season is a whopping 94% better than the league average. Last season, it was 89% better. 

As for wOBA, or Weighted On-Base Average, it assigns proper value to every possible offensive event that happens while a batter is at the plate. Those proper valuations of singles, doubles, homers, walks, etc., distinguish wOBA from more traditional measures like AVG, OBP, and SLG. For simplicity, wOBA is scaled to look like OBP, which means that, say, .400 is elite and .290 is pretty poor. Ohtani’s wOBA is up over 2025 levels by six points. His current OPS+ and wOBA are both career highs. 

We’re within spitting distance of June, which means we can talk a bit about statistical paces without veering into the wholly ridiculous. Let’s take a look at some of Ohtani’s 2024 outputs and compare them to his current 2025 pace: 

As you can see, Ohtani is on target to ever-so-slightly top his 2024 numbers in home runs and total bases and enjoy big bumps in walks and runs scored. That runs scored tally of 169, by the way, would be the second-highest figure of the modern era. Since 1900, only Babe Ruth’s 177 runs scored in 1921 would top it. Ohtani’s also on pace to draw 100 walks for the first time in his career. Oh, and he’s in line to become just the ninth player ever — and just the fifth player in the Integrated Era — to rack up at least 400 total bases and 100 walks in the same season.

As for RBI, Ohtani in 2025 has batted exclusively in the leadoff spot, which of course is not a slot given to ribbie-hoarding. In 2024, he batted leadoff the majority of the time, but he also batted in the two hole in Dave Roberts’ lineups for 42.7% of his total plate appearances. For what it’s worth, Ohtani this season has a modestly higher OPS with runners in scoring position than he did in 2024. If paces hold, Ohtani will become just the fourth player ever to notch 100 RBI from the leadoff spot. 

Ohtani has scaled back his steals and stolen-base attempts this season, possibly in an effort to stay healthy and limit fatigue as he methodically works his way back toward pitching at some indeterminate future date. That said, Ohtani, while he’s very unlikely to reach 50 steals again, is, per Statcast estimations, doing a better job of taking the extra base than he did in 2024. He’s also on pace to hit into fewer double plays. Add it up, and Statcast drops his baserunning value from the 100th percentile in 2024 to the … 98th percentile in 2025.  

The underlying numbers

It goes without saying that Ohtani is a master of batted-ball authority, i.e., hitting the ball hard and at the ideal angle range for power production. That’s again the case in 2025, and he’s even enjoyed some modest — there’s that word again — upticks in the most important indicators. Here’s a look at the key measures from 2024: 

And here’s 2025: 

Broadly speaking, Ohtani is hitting the ball harder this season and showing increased bat speed while also at the same time reducing whiffs and strikeouts, and he’s also chasing pitches outside the strike zone at a lower clip. Probably not unrelated is that Ohtani has tweaked his stance just a bit. Relative to last season, he’s standing a bit closer to the pitcher, a bit further back from the plate, and he’s got a slightly more open stance. Perhaps as a result, he’s contacting pitches further out front, and, per Statcast, he’s achieving the ideal attack angle on pitches 56.3% of the time versus 51.6% of the time last season. 

If there’s a bottom line to all this, it’s found in Ohtani’s xwOBA or his Expected Weighted On-Base Average. Building off wOBA, xwOBA an estimation of what a hitter’s wOBA should be based on things like exit velocity off the bat and launch angle. xwOBA attempts to strip away luck — bad or good — and defensive play from wOBA and identify a hitter’s baseline skill. It’s useful for getting an idea of how a hitter figures to perform in the near-term future. Basically, if a hitter’s xwOBA is significantly lower than his wOBA, he’s probably going to come back to earth at some point. On the other side of things, if a hitter’s xwOBA is quite a bit higher than his wOBA, then better days are likely ahead.

In Ohtani’s case, his 2025 xwOBA is scraping the sky at .486. That’s a full 44 points higher than his 2024 xwOBA, and it’s a hefty points higher than his current wOBA. Presently, only Aaron Judge‘s xwOBA of .490 is higher than Ohtani’s .486. It’s in this important regard, one that encompasses all that goes into a hitter’s capacity to do damage, that Ohtani has truly reached new heights (and keep in mind that he’s already lapping the field as the National League MVP favorite for 2025, at -110, per FanDuel). As great as Ohtani has been at the plate in 2025, there’s cause to believe he’s been unlucky so far. Mull that over for a moment. 

Redefining the possible in baseball has in some ways become old hat for Ohtani, but maybe he’s not done with all of that. We keep saying he’s better than ever because, well, he is. The 2025 season looks like no exception in that regard.