"Shohei Ohtani swings the bat so damn hard" – Tanner Bibee shares the dangers of making a mistake against Dodgers superstar

Shohei Ohtani hit 54 home runs in 2024 on his way to a historic 50-50 season. One of those home runs came against Tanner Bibee in September. The 450-foot moonshot at Dodger Stadium was one of the longest the Japanese phenom hit.

On the "Pitching Network" podcast with host Rob Friedman, the Guardians pitcher opened up about what it meant to pitch to someone like Ohtani. He said that Ohtani's bat swing made him a challenge to face in the box.

"(Ohtani) swings the bat so damn hard to where, if you make a mistake, he's gonna take you for 480 the one thing you do is don't throw him a change up, right down the middle," Bibee said on Sunday.

He recalled Ohtani's 46th home run of the season against his pitching that ended in a 4-0 win for the home team. As per Bibee, he felt confident heading into the matchup as he seemed to have Ohtani's number in previous encounters and caught him stealing in an earlier at-bat in the same game.

"It went really far," Bibee said. "And the year before I faced him, I struck him out twice, and I was feeling real good. And then he hit a jam shot earlier in that game, and then I picked him off, and I was like, This is good. This is really good. And then I guess I'm a dude to that in a shot."

The home run was one of Ohtani's nine 450+ feet homers in 2024. His farthest was against Colorado Rockies pitcher Austin Gomber in June which reached 476 feet.

Why bat speed metric has become crucial against players like Shohei Ohtani?

Tanner Bibee said that Shohei Ohtani's bat speed is one of the crucial factors that was introduced in the world of baseball last year. With analytics and technology an important aspect of the sport, Baseball Savant introduced bat speed as a metric in mid-May.

Initially, Ohtani's average bat speed was 75.5 mph, which was a 92 percentile score among all eligible hitters in the MLB at that time. It was the highest on the Dodgers with Teoscar Hernandez second at 73.9 mph average.

As the season progressed, the value of the bat speed along with the exit velocity was seen as a metric to analyze the power a batter possessed in at-bats. In the last four seasons, Ohtani has ranked in the top 1% of all batters in exit velocity off the bat.