LOS ANGELES — On a night when the headline was already written, Shohei Ohtani went ahead and added a few more exclamation points.
A few hours after being named National League Most Valuable Player by unanimous vote, Ohtani’s Thursday turned into a full-scale awards parade. By the time the MLB Awards show wrapped in Las Vegas, the Dodgers’ superstar had picked up the Edgar Martinez Outstanding Designated Hitter Award, the Hank Aaron Award, and another All-MLB First Team nod. For a player who just finished his second season in Dodger blue, it was the kind of haul that feels less like a surprise and more like a confirmation of what everyone just watched for the last six months. Back up the U-haul to bring that hardware back to LA!
Let’s start with the Edgar Martinez Award, given to the best Designated Hitter in baseball (once exclusively an AL prize, now is a league-wide honor). Ohtani was already the first Dodger ever to win it when he grabbed the brass ring last year. Now he has gone back-to-back in the National League and five straight overall, becoming only the second player in Major League history to win the DH award in five consecutive seasons, joining Hall of Famer David Ortiz from the Red Sox. The list of past winners reads like a power hitter’s Hall of Fame, and Ohtani is already climbing toward the top.
The numbers behind the trophy are almost cartoonish. Ohtani hit .282 with 55 homers, 20 steals, 146 runs, and 102 RBI. He set the Dodgers franchise record for runs scored in a season and broke his own club mark for homers after hitting 54 the year before. Across the Majors, he finished first in extra-base hits (89), first in runs, first in total bases (380), tied for tenth in hits (172), third in home runs, near the top of the leaderboard in RBI, and among the very best in on-base percentage (.392), slugging (.622) and OPS (1.014).
Among designated hitters specifically, the gap was even wider. Ohtani led all DHs in extra-base hits, total bases, hits, triples, runs scored and walks, tied for the lead in homers and ranked second in RBI and OPS. He also became the first player in Major League history to record multiple seasons with at least 50 home runs and 20 stolen bases, following his 50/50 masterpiece in 2024. For an award that now carries Edgar Martinez’s name, the fact that Ohtani has already matched Martinez’s five career wins — and trails only Ortiz’s eight — tells you exactly where his offensive seasons are being filed historically.
Then there is the Hank Aaron Award, given to the top hitter in each league. Ohtani claimed the National League honor for the second straight year and the third consecutive season overall, joining Alex Rodriguez (2001–03) as the only players ever to win the award three years in a row. He now sits in a tiny club of three-time winners that includes Rodriguez, Barry Bonds and Aaron Judge, who was awarded this year’s Aaron award for the American League.
The stat line is the same, but the Dodger context matters. Ohtani became just the second Dodger to win the Hank Aaron Award, joining Matt Kemp’s 2011 season. He set franchise records for both home runs and runs scored, surpassing marks that he himself had set in 2024. He walked more than 100 times, becoming the first Dodger to do so since Gary Sheffield in 2000. He matched Mookie Betts’ team record with 12 leadoff homers in a single season and crushed 32 long balls before the All-Star break, another Dodgers record.
The league noticed along the way. Ohtani took home the National League Player of the Month award for May after hitting .309 with 15 homers and 27 RBI in 27 games, tying Pedro Guerrero and Duke Snider for the most home runs by a Dodger in any month. He reached another personal milestone on August 6 against the Cardinals, recording his 1,000th career hit and joining Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui as the only Japanese-born players to reach that plateau in the big leagues. Add in his NLCS MVP award from October and it becomes clear that the Hank Aaron trophy is not hanging alone on the wall.
The night in Las Vegas added one more line to Ohtani’s resume: All-MLB First Team designated hitter for the World Champion Dodgers. It is his fifth straight All-MLB selection and his fifth career First Team nod, putting him alongside Aaron Judge in that five-in-a-row club. The All-MLB teams are voted on by fans and a panel of media members, broadcasters and former players, which gives this one a slightly different feel. It is not just numbers on a stat sheet, it is the wider baseball world saying, again, that Ohtani is the standard at his position.
The Dodgers were well represented on the All-MLB stage. Yoshinobu Yamamoto joined Ohtani on the First Team as one of the five starting pitchers, and Will Smith landed on the Second Team at catcher. For a franchise that just repeated as World Series champions, seeing multiple players pick up All-MLB hardware alongside their two-way icon felt fitting, almost inevitable. This is what a modern powerhouse looks like: an MVP at the center, elite pitching at the top of the rotation, and an All-Star catcher handling it all.
Still, even on a loaded roster, Thursday belonged to Ohtani. The Edgar Martinez Award confirmed that he is still redefining what a designated hitter can be. The Hank Aaron Award said he was the best bat in the league, again. The All-MLB nod put him, once more, on a short list of the game’s biggest stars. And the unanimous MVP, announced earlier in the evening, wrapped all of those threads into one simple point: in 2025, there was nobody quite like the Dodgers’ number 17.
For Dodger fans, this is the good part. You get to look back on another title run and realize that even in a clubhouse full of champions, you are watching a once-in-a-generation hitter stack up awards that used to belong to other city’s legends. Ortiz, Martinez, Aaron, Judge, Bonds, Rodriguez. On Thursday night, Shohei Ohtani’s name kept landing in the same sentences as all of them, and the trophies heading to Chavez Ravine told the story better than any press release ever could.
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