Angelenos

It was one of those performances that will be spoken about for years.

Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani delivered a night for the ages in the Dodgers’ 5-1 win over the Milwaukee Brewers in the clinching fourth game of the National League Championship Series on Friday night.

After slumping throughout the postseason, the Japanese sensation hit three home runs and pitched six shutout innings with 10 strikeouts at Chavez Ravine to advance the Dodgers to the World Series.

The effort immediately drew praise from baseball writers as the “greatest game ever,” “the performance of a lifetime,” and highlighted the “improbability of his greatness.”

Yes, the Dodgers are advancing to their second-straight World Series, where they’ll face either the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays, beginning Friday.

They will attempt to become the first Major League Baseball team to win consecutive crowns since the New York Yankees’ threepeat from 1998 to 2000.

However, the night became a celebration of Ohtani, as documented by my sports colleagues.

Let’s take a look at some of what made Friday such a magical evening.

Trying to understand what Ohtani accomplished

Columnist Bill Plaschke asked Dodgers fans if they realized what they were watching:

Los Angeles, can you understand the singular greatness that plays here? Fall Classic, are you ready for another dose of Sho-time?

Ohtani and the Dodgers are back on baseball’s grandest stage, arguably the best player in baseball history concocting arguably the best single-game performance in postseason history.

The final score was 5-1, but, really, it was over at 1-0, Ohtani’s thunderous leadoff homer after his thundering three strikeouts igniting a dancing Dodger Stadium crowd and squelching the Brewers before the first inning was even 10 minutes old.

How far did that first home-run actually travel? Back, back, back into forever, it was the first leadoff homer by a pitcher in baseball history, regular season or postseason, a feat unmatched by even the legendary Babe Ruth.

The unicorn Ohtani basically created the same wizardry again in the fourth inning and added a third longball in the seventh in carrying the Dodgers to their second consecutive World Series and fifth in nine years while further cementing their status as one of baseball’s historic dynasties.

Why was the effort surprising?

On that off-day between Games 2 and 3 of the National League Championship Series, Ohtani looked like a man on a mission, according to Dodgers beat writer Jack Harris in his game story:

Ohtani took one of the best rounds of batting practice anyone in attendance had seen, getting into the real work of trying to fix a swing that had abandoned him for much of this postseason.

In 32 swings, Ohtani hit 14 home runs. Many of them were moonshots. One even clanged off the roof of the right-field pavilion.

Over his previous seven games, going back to the start of the NL Division Series, he had two hits in 25 at-bats.

He had recorded 12 strikeouts and plenty more puzzling swing decisions. And he seemed, at least in the estimation of some around the team, unusually perturbed as public criticisms of his play started to mount.

Then, two days later, a tour de force performance that will be talked about forever.

“He woke up this morning with people questioning him,” said Andrew Friedman, Dodgers president of baseball operations, during an alcohol-soaked celebration in the clubhouse afterward. “And 12 hours later, he’s standing on the podium as the NLCS MVP.”

Up next for the Dodgers is the World Series and perhaps some more Ohtani magic.

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Los Angeles just can’t get a break.

The latest embarrassment is LA28 chair Casey Wasserman, the man tasked with making sure the 2028 Summer Olympics are a massive success. At a news conference this week announcing that President Trump will head a federal Olympics task force, Wasserman offered L.A. a giant whoopie cushion.

With Wasserman at his left side, Trump vowed to bring L.A. “back stronger than ever.” On Trump’s right was a rash of L.A. haters, some of whom played a prominent role in Southern California’s summer of deportations, including Vice President JD Vance and Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem. Not present, but hailed by Trump during the presser as an “MVP candidate,” was Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has made it his life’s mission to crush the multicultural metropolis that birthed him.

So what did Wasserman, a prominent Democratic donor who in recent months has thrown some cash at Republican committees, do in front of people who want to rain holy hell on his hometown?

He praised Trump’s “support” of the L.A. Olympics as “truly extraordinary” and gifted him a set of medals from the 1984 Games hosted by the city. If that wasn’t groveling enough, Wasserman was grinning after Trump joked about not using an autopen to sign the executive order creating the task force — a jab at President Biden. It was more bricks on the foundation Wasserman has been laying since January, when he met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

I haven’t seen such a suck-up since the last time I vacuumed my dad’s pool.

The federal government was always going to play a role in providing security for the 2028 Olympics, just as it has for previous Games in the U.S. But Trump, as the head of the task force, now gets to personally oversee our own siege.

When asked by a reporter if he would deploy the military to L.A. the way he did this summer, Trump responded, “We’ll do anything necessary to keep the Olympics safe, including using our National Guard or military, OK?”

With the Games happening in a presidential election year, Trump would love nothing more than to traipse around an L.A. radically transformed by his deportation blitzkrieg to proclaim his mission accomplished and broadcast his conquest to the world.

That’s why L.A. needs to withdraw from hosting the Olympics — the sooner the better.

Trump’s news conference, where he also called Mayor Karen Bass “not very competent,” looked like a preview of what we can expect in the lead-up to the Games. Hey, maybe the president will fall in love with the city over the next three years — and maybe Miller’s bald pate will grow hair worthy of Samson. But history has shown that no amount of puckering up to Trump will deter him from his goals — and a long-standing one is to humiliate blue L.A. at every chance.

Angelenos: Do ustedes really want to give Trump and his goon squad more chances to make life miserable for y’all? You don’t stand idly by as your sworn enemy assumes even more power to mess with you — you toss that problem elsewhere if you can. And you definitely don’t entrust kiss asses like Wasserman — I’m still not sure what he did to deserve his powerful LA28 gig, except being the grandson of the late Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman — with calming down someone like Trump. That’s like giving a rich kid a Super Soaker and telling him to water the Huntington Library gardens.

Mayor Karen Bass speaks at an event with local leaders in front of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 2024.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

In a city that has long faced existential problems, the idea of staging such a spectacle always sat uneasy with me. Boosters have drowned out skeptics by insisting that the Olympics will help the city and come at “no cost” to taxpayers. But the city government will have to cover the first $270 million of any cost overruns or revenue shortfalls — and where on earth would that money come from?

Indeed, few Olympics ever turn a profit. The organizing committee behind last year’s Paris Games claimed to have brought in about $30 million — which isn’t bad, but it’s just 3% of the nearly billion-dollar budget deficit that the city of L.A. faced at the beginning of the year.

Expecting the Olympics to be a financial and spiritual salvation for the city betrays Angelenos’ lack of trust in their ability to save themselves. Nevertheless, an executive for the tourism group Visit California said at a state Senate committee hearing last month that hosting the Games would present a “refreshed global image of California as the most welcoming destination in the nation.”

Spare me the PR pablum. The city doesn’t need a multibillion-dollar ad campaign to let the world know how cool it is or make it believe in itself. It needs people committed to solving problems for those who have to live with them daily — not for tourists and visiting athletes.

Supporters will whine that pulling out of the Olympics at this point is a huge inconvenience and will wreck L.A.’s global standing. But withdrawing from a commitment to host a huge sporting event isn’t unprecedented. Denver dumped the 1976 Winter Olympics three years and three months before they were set to open, and its reputation came out just fine. Mexico hosted the 1986 World Cup after Colombia pulled out three years earlier.

By passing on the Olympics, L.A. officials can set aside their concerns about whether producing a month’s worth of seven Super Bowls a day, as Wasserman loves to boast, will strain city resources. Wasserman and his band of the best and the brightest can focus on what L.A. really needs, not how to transform SoFi Stadium into an aquatics center.

And if LA28 throws a snit fit over the move? Well, then you know how truly committed they were to bettering L.A. in the first place.

I write this columna as a huge Olympics fan who watches the opening ceremony every four years, the Games’ problems be damned. I have vague but fond memories of the 1984 Games and clearly remember the Sam the Olympic Eagle lunchbox I toted around in first grade. I was looking forward to trying to score tickets to the swimming events for my wife, who was a competitive backstroker at University High in Irvine, and me.

But I don’t want my money going toward something that Trump will use to bolster his noxious legacy. I’m not going to cheer on Wasserman as he chums up Trump while la migra continues to terrorize L.A., possibly for months, if not years. I don’t want to support an event where footage of an occupied L.A. might be as front and center as the Coliseum or badminton.

What true Angeleno would?