Jose Altuve haters were eating good on Tuesday night.
Altuve and the Houston Astros played Tuesday at home against Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers. In the fifth inning at Daikin Park in Houston, Texas, Altuve ended up producing one of the most humiliating moments of his entire career.
Batting against the Dodgers superstar Ohtani, Altuve went down in the count 1-2 with runners on the corners and two outs. Ohtani ended up throwing Altuve a two-strike waste pitch … well, at least until Altuve swung at it.
The reigning NL MVP Ohtani clearly pulled a 89-mph sweeper, and the pitch ended up nowhere even remotely close to the strike zone. But somehow, Altuve was completely fooled and fanned at the pitch from another zip code for an inning-ending strikeout.
Here is the embarrassing video.
Shohei Ohtani made Altuve look SILLY to get out of the jam pic.twitter.com/CxFAk5Z74u
— B/R Walk-Off (@BRWalkoff) May 6, 2026
Altuve used to regularly face Ohtani in the AL West back when Ohtani was still a member of the Los Angeles Angels. But during Tuesday’s game, Altuve looked no better than an eight-year-old with an inflatable bat swinging at that awful pitch.
In the end though, the Astros got the last laugh by earning a 2-1 win after the Dodgers offered no run support to Ohtani (only scoring once in the eighth inning after Ohtani had thrown his final pitch). But Ohtani, who struck out eight over his seven innings of work, is still looking like a frontrunner for the NL Cy Young Award. As a bonus on Tuesday, he got to make Altuve look even more overmatched than he did during his brief stint as an outfielder.
