Ohtani Homers on the First Pitch of His Own Start, Drops ERA to 0.73

Why This Topic Landed in Japan

The play itself — a starting pitcher hitting a home run on the first pitch he sees, in a game he is starting — is the kind of statistical oddity that makes a story self-propelling. The follow-on (five scoreless innings, ERA down to 0.73) turned it from a highlight into a season-defining moment. Japanese summary sites layered a second story on top: Korean sports media outlets ran rapturous "he's not human" reactions, and the summary scene then bundled those reactions with Japanese commentary, producing the recurring Japan–Korea proxy argument that drives clicks. As a result, two largely separate conversations were happening on the same topic — one about baseball, one about reactions to the reactions.

Key Reaction Themes

• "Video-game numbers" awe at the two-way performance — Commenters keep circling back to the absurdity of the dual feat: a starting pitcher hitting the first pitch of the game he is throwing, then giving up zero runs over five innings. An ERA of 0.73 is treated as "you couldn't even build this character in a game."
• A "first" with an asterisk — Several careful readers point out that the "MLB first" framing has to be narrow: a pitcher hitting a leadoff HR isn't unprecedented, but doing it on the first pitch of a game he is starting himself is the specific record. Some commenters bring this up to push back on tabloid headlines.
• Japan-vs-Korea reaction loop — The Korean media's "he's a god / he's not human" coverage is then quoted back inside Japanese summary threads, where the conversation drifts away from Ohtani and into older Japan–Korea sports nationalism, including jabs at specific Korean MLB players and K-pop. SNS does not follow this pivot — there the focus stays on the game itself.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

• "Ohtani: 'I just felt the leadoff hitter did a good job for me right at the start.'"
• "First. Pitch. Game-winner."
• "Split personality lol"
• "A starting pitcher hitting a leadoff home run on the very first pitch — that's legend Shohei Ohtani."
• "Diaz, Snell, Glasnow, Edman, Kiké, others — with this many key players hurt and still in first place, what does that say about the rest of the league?"
• "Apparently 'a starting pitcher hitting a home run on the first pitch of his own game' is an MLB first — but for Ohtani himself, it isn't even his first."
• "Go cheer for your own broken-down players."
• "Kim Hye-seong: 1-for-4, 0 RBI. Song Sung-moon: benched. Lee Jung-hoo: injured again. Kim Ha-seong: injured again."
• "The only one actually on the field is Hye-seong. MLB is starting to look like the European football top-5 leagues, lol."
• "But K-pop is filling up the Billboard charts though…"
• "It's isolated, so of course they dominate it — they only have K-poop."
• "What did Ohtani do? Whatever it is, he hasn't even cleared the innings minimum, so it doesn't really mean anything (lol). He's not even ranked on the Japanese stats sites."