Culture
Shohei Ohtani adds to Dodgers postseason highlight reel with late-game moonshot
NEW YORK — Shohei Ohtani perked up when he heard his name.
“I told him,” Dodgers backup catcher Austin Barnes said after Ohtani’s three-run moonshot iced an 8-0 victory over the Mets in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, “hit the ball over the fence.”
“Not bad advice,” Ohtani said.
Barnes clapped his hands three times. “Like, ‘Today, man, over the fence.’”
Ohtani beamed as he dressed to leave the ballpark, two victories away from the World Series.
“Good coaching,” Ohtani said.
The game is not that easy for Ohtani. But sometimes he can make it look so, as he did in the eighth inning Wednesday, hitting a ball that looked capable of landing in Flushing Bay if the second deck of Citi Field had not gotten in the way.
Shohei Ohtani has not recorded a hit in 22 at-bats with no one on base but has seven hits in nine at-bats with runners aboard. (Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
The home run ushered a procession of Mets fans to the exits, extended Ohtani’s bizarre postseason splits and eased the tension for manager Dave Roberts. The Dodgers arrived in Queens this week hoping to sneak through three consecutive games while using starting pitchers unable to last deep into games. With one swing, Ohtani boosted the lead and protected the bullpen. Roberts did not have to use high-leverage relievers Evan Phillips and Daniel Hudson. With Yoshinobu Yamamoto starting in Game 4, the team should have Phillips and Hudson plus Blake Treinen and Michael Kopech, who combined for two scoreless innings Wednesday, lined up.
“Those things matter,” Roberts said.
This is Ohtani’s first time in the postseason. He has competed under a microscope for much of his professional career, but never before have American audiences studied his at-bats at such a granular level. He contributed two hits in a Game 1 victory and walked twice in a Game 2 defeat. Yet he had made the game seem so simple in the season’s final months — whenever he saw a pitch, he hit it with great force — that every out he made appeared a portent of a lengthy slump.
Roberts has suggested that Ohtani was swinging too often at pitches outside the strike zone. He looked lost against Mets starter Sean Mananea in Game 2. Tuesday, before the Dodgers worked out at Citi Field, Ohtani fended off questions about his confidence and approach. He did not believe he was wilting beneath the postseason glare. He did not consider himself in the midst of a dreadful stretch.
“I do feel OK at the plate,” Ohtani said through his interpreter, Will Ireton. “I do feel like I (can) recall back to the times when I (felt) good and perhaps incorporate that into it.”
Part of the concern stemmed from an odd disparity in his splits. Ohtani has not recorded a hit in 22 at-bats with no one on base, yet he has seven hits in nine at-bats with runners aboard. The difference might matter less for most sluggers, but Ohtani leads off the Dodgers lineup. He used his legs to steal 59 bases during the regular season. He has stolen none in October.
Ohtani insisted Tuesday that this brief lull in his production would not alter his intentions as a hitter. “Regardless of however they are pitching to me, my plan is to stay with the same approach as much as possible and not really be too focused on how they attack me,” he said.
Ohtani made good on that promise in Game 3. He grounded out on the first pitch he saw, a 95 mph fastball from Mets starter Luis Severino. Two innings later, with Severino unable to find the zone, Ohtani took a walk. In the sixth, after Kiké Hernández’s two-run homer, Ohtani flailed as Mets reliever Reed Garrett’s 0-2 cutter dove toward his cleats.
All those at-bats occurred with the bases empty. Ohtani’s fourth did not. He followed Will Smith’s walk and a two-out single by Hernández. Mets reliever Tylor Megill tried to sneak an 0-1 cutter for an inside strike. Ohtani waffled the ball into right field. A collective gasp overtook the 43,883 fans packed inside the ballpark. The statistics do not do the homer justice: 115.9 mph off the bat, at an estimated distance of 397 feet. The ball hooked near the pole, close enough to merit a replay review.
“I don’t know how you would even overturn that,” said third baseman Max Muncy, who reached base in five plate appearances and added a solo shot in the ninth. “The ball was 100 feet over the foul pole. The foul pole’s not tall enough for that one.”
The home run changed the calculus for Robert’s endgame. He had used Treinen, one of his relief aces, to face the bottom of the Mets lineup in the seventh. As the eighth inning began, with the Dodgers up four, Hudson loosened up in the bullpen. If the score remained the same, Treinen would return for the eighth. If the Dodgers added a run, Hudson would pitch. Adding three runs? That allowed Roberts to send rookie Ben Casparius for the final two innings. “The more the runs we score, that makes it easier,” Treinen said.
The bullpen figures to be close to full strength for Game 4. The Dodgers are trying to navigate this series without Mets hitters Francisco Lindor, Mark Vientos and Pete Alonso receiving repeated looks at the same relievers. Thus far, Roberts has succeeded. “The more we can hide guys, keep them from going in, it’s probably ideal,” Hudson said.
Ohtani left the ballpark without speaking to reporters. He did not need to say much. “It was important,” Roberts said, “for Shohei to build some confidence.” His team holds the high ground. His swing silenced a ballpark and saved his bullpen. It also offered a reminder. Even amid this relative downturn in his hitting, Ohtani can inspire awe. That, of course, is not shocking.
(Top photo of Shohei Ohtani: Elsa / Getty Images)
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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