Shohei Ohtani just shattered the Dodgers' hard-hit leaderboard for the second time

Los Angeles Dodgers v Washington Nationals
Los Angeles Dodgers v Washington Nationals | Mitchell Layton/GettyImages

The sound of Shohei Ohtani hitting a home run is unmistakeable, so much so that fans have made compilations of home run bat cracks that you can loop over and over and over as you see fit. He's given fans a lot of content for things like that, too; he hit his 176th career homer on Sunday to break Hideki Matsui's record for home runs by a Japanese-born player.

Just a few days later, he put No. 177 on the board. On Tuesday night, the Dodgers had a 3-1 lead over the Nationals in Washington, thanks to some life finding the bottom of the lineup, when Ohtani came up for the fifth time that night in the top of the ninth. He saw a ball, then Nats reliever Matt Barnes left a splitter hanging, and Ohtani crushed it 450 feet to right field, where it was caught by a gleeful Dodgers fan.

As soon as Ohtani hit the ball, he knew it was gone, Barnes knew it was gone, everyone knew it was gone. It's no surprise, because as soon as his bat connected with the ball, it became the hardest-hit ball by a Dodger in the Statcast era (or, since 2015), tracked at 118.7 MPH.

Shohei Ohtani's 177th home run broke Dodgers' hard-hit leaderboard with ease

Analyst Sarah Langs noted that not only did the home run give him No. 1 in those particular standings, but a double he hit back in March at 115.8 MPH ranked at No. 3, behind a Yasiel Puig groundout back in 2017 at 116.0 MPH. That means Ohtani, after less than a month's work, now maintains the top two hardest base hits of any Dodger since Statcast was introduced. She also reminded us that Ohtani had only been a Dodger for 25 games through Tuesday, and already he's managed to make breaking team records look easy.

Although his home run on Tuesday was a solo homer, he's also slowly getting better at hitting with runners in scoring position. Going into Sunday's game, he was hitting .095 with RISP; a few days later, he's improved that to a .130 batting average — still far from ideal, but a marked difference between where he was just a few days ago and now.

He still needs to be more patient at the plate, but the reassuring thing about Ohtani is that, when he does manage to get ahold of one, he really gets ahold of it.

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