Shohei Ohtani changes the plaque on his NLCS MVP trophy with a heartwarming message for his Dodgers teammates – NBC Los Angeles

Shohei Ohtani’s 2025 National League Championship Series MVP trophy sat quietly in the center of the Dodgers’ clubhouse this week — a gleaming reminder of Ohtani’s otherworldly performance in Game 4 of the the NLCS against the Brewers.

But if you looked closer, the nameplate that read “Most Valuable Player” had been covered by a simple note: “Team Effort.”

That’s Ohtani in a nutshell. A man who can hit baseballs into orbit, strike out ten in six scoreless innings, and still point the spotlight away from himself.

Sources told NBC LA that Ohtani had asked one of the Dodgers clubhouse attendants to place the “Team Effort” note over the placard of the trophy and display it in the center of the Dodgers’ clubhouse for all of his teammates to see.

After the Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers to punch their ticket back to the World Series for the second straight year, Ohtani stood atop the baseball world once again. His Game 4 masterpiece — three home runs, six shutout innings on the mound, with 10 strikeouts — will live forever in postseason lore. It wasn’t just a performance; it was a global phenomenon.

And yet, in the aftermath, when the cameras had dimmed and the champagne had dried, Ohtani chose humility over heroics. The covered placard was his quiet sermon — a reminder that baseball, even in its most individual moments of brilliance, remains a team symphony.

Ohtani may have single-handedly dominated the Brewers in Game 4, but he also knows the truth: that the struggled at the plate through the first three games of the series, and without the help of his fellow starting pitchers; Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Tyler Glasnow, the Dodgers would have never been in the position to clinch entering Game 4.

Ohtani also knows that without the Dodgers lineup knocking in runs in Milwaukee, picking him up when his bat was cold, there is no NLCS victory. Without the bullpen shutting the door in the later innings of the series, there is no trophy. There is no Game 4 legacy.

“It’s not a surprise because Shohei is such a good teammate,” said Dodgers’ manager Dave Roberts when asked about Ohtani covering the NLCS MVP trophy placard so that it said “Team Effort. “That award was a team effort. Shohei had a huge game in Game 4, but he realized Games 1, 2, and 3, you could have had [Blake] Snell, [Yoshinobu] Yamamoto, Tommy Edman, Teoscar [Hernandez], any one of them could have been the team MVP, and for Shohei to do that, it shows you just what a good teammate he is.”

Now, with another Fall Classic looming, the Dodgers’ superstar has once again shifted the narrative. The focus isn’t on his personal greatness — it’s on a clubhouse chasing history together.

A trophy may carry one name.

But a championship? That belongs to everyone.