Shohei Ohtani was named the 2025 National League Most Valuable Player on Thursday, receiving all 30 first-place votes from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. The decision, announced from Las Vegas, handed him a fourth unanimous MVP — a feat no player in Major League history has approached.
Ohtani left no room for debate. Philadelphia’s Kyle Schwarber collected 23 second-place votes and New York’s Juan Soto claimed four, but the ballot order after the Japanese star was a formality. The sweep marked his fourth consecutive MVP won without dissent, extending a streak that began in the American League in 2021.
A season rebuilt on two-way steel
The 2025 campaign opened with Ohtani still calibrating his return to the mound. Elbow surgery had kept him from pitching for roughly a year and a half, and the Dodgers brought him along inside a six-man rotation with a strict innings cap. Across 14 starts he logged just 47 innings, yet carved a 2.87 ERA with 62 strikeouts against nine walks.
At the plate, the workload expanded without apology. He slashed .282/.392/.622, drove a career-high 55 home runs, and led the National League with a 1.014 OPS and a 179 adjusted OPS. His 146 runs scored topped all of baseball, second-most in Dodgers franchise history since the 19th century. Schwarber alone hit one more homer, but nobody combined the damage Ohtani did with the outs he got on the other side of the ball.
October sealed the argument, again
The month that mattered most confirmed the vote before it was cast. In Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings with ten strikeouts and hit three home runs, completing a sweep that sent Los Angeles back to the World Series. Later, in an 18-inning Game 3 classic, he reached base all nine times he stepped to the box.
He finished the postseason with eight home runs, tying a franchise record, and the Dodgers beat Toronto in Game 7 to become baseball’s first repeat champion in a quarter-century. Ohtani started that title-clincher on the mound, the two-way promise fully restored for the occasion.
Four trophies, a category alone
The honour places Ohtani in a tier occupied by only one other name. Barry Bonds’ seven MVPs remain the record, but Ohtani stands as the second player ever to win four overall and the only one to win multiple in both the American and National Leagues, with Frank Robinson the lone predecessor for a cross-league double. The four unanimous verdicts similarly isolate him — there have been 24 unanimous MVPs in league history, and Ohtani holds four of them.
“The biggest thing is obviously being able to win the World Series,” he told reporters via an interpreter. “That’s first and foremost.”
The 2025 award is the latest step in a career that has reordered baseball’s assumptions. A championship and an MVP in each of his first two seasons with a new club has no precedent across the four major North American sports. The record now stands at four unanimous nods, and the autumns keep delivering a single, resonant verdict.
