Chris Brockman’s Shohei Hot Take Gets Worse with Every Ohtani Start

Chris Brockman had a take, and it is aging like milk. With O'Shea Jackson Jr. in the host chair, the show dragged Brockman back to his declaration that Shohei Ohtani should stop pitching, and then watched him squirm.

The original argument was confident. Enough with the pitching sideshow, Brockman had insisted. Ohtani needs to go back to hitting only, or the Dodgers are not making the NLCS. His logic leaned on the recent past: Ohtani did not pitch for two years, produced a 50-50 season, and looked like the greatest offensive player anyone has ever seen. Now that he is back on the mound, Brockman noted, he is hitting around .240. One thing, he argued, takes away from the other.

The problem is what Ohtani has done since. As the show gleefully pointed out, Ohtani has barely given up a hit on the mound and has launched not one but two leadoff home runs, doing it again the night before. Brockman, who said he went to a couple of games over the weekend and watched Ohtani not hit the broad side of a barn, had nowhere to hide. Even he had to concede the obvious: Ohtani is a freak, the monster Los Angeles knows and loves, and the greatest thing baseball has ever seen.

The segment dissolved into exactly the kind of bit the show does best when Jackson is in the chair. He floated renaming himself "O'Shea Ohtani," joked about clearing it with his dad, and teed up a Twitter poll between that and the show's other fresh nickname of the day. He also debuted a new prop, little figurines of his father in lowriders complete with tiny championship trophies, marveling that Ice Cube has somehow become the honorary mascot of the operation.

Jackson closed on a note of genuine fandom, recalling a Lakers-first household that has fully adopted the Dodgers, from the Yu Darvish years to now. His first baseball game ever, he admitted, was at Shea Stadium, where Mike Piazza ruined his day. These days, Ohtani has a standing offer to borrow his car and a plate at the house, which is more grace than Brockman's pitching take is getting.