The Dodgers gave the baseball world an Ohtani update it did not want to hear.
Los Angeles has walked back some of its optimism about Shohei Ohtani’s return to the mound, telling reporters this weekend that the two-way superstar is dealing with health issues that could impact his ability to pitch again in the regular season. It is a shift in tone from earlier in August, when the club had seemed to signal Ohtani could be back on the mound very soon.
This matters for a lot of reasons. Start with the National League MVP race.
Ohtani has been the front-runner in that conversation for most of the year, doing the Ohtani thing at the plate while also working his way back as a starting pitcher from Tommy John surgery. His run for a fourth MVP was going to hinge, at least partially, on whether he could add real pitching innings to a season already loaded with home runs.
Without those innings, the door opens.
Pete Crow-Armstrong just launched three home runs at Wrigley Field on the day the Cubs celebrated their 150th anniversary. He is a legitimate MVP candidate now, playing elite center field defense, hitting 36 home runs, driving in 89 runs, and captaining a Cubs team in the middle of the pennant race. If Ohtani is hitting only, the two-way narrative that has separated him from every other candidate for years gets thinner.
The Dodgers, however, are not going to lose sleep over MVP voting. Their concern is the playoffs.
Los Angeles paid a fortune at the trade deadline to acquire Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers, giving up outfielder Zyhir Hope and pitchers River Ryan and Brady Smith to land the reigning AL Cy Young winner. The plan was straightforward. Skubal fronts the rotation, Yoshinobu Yamamoto stabilizes the middle, and Ohtani reappears on the mound at some point to give the Dodgers three top-of-the-rotation weapons in October.
If Ohtani is not pitching in the postseason, that plan changes.
Skubal is coming off his first Dodgers start at Comerica Park in his return to Detroit, and he was excellent, striking out seven over six innings. The Dodgers rotation can still be dangerous with Skubal, Yamamoto, and their supporting arms. But losing the third ace in what was supposed to be a three-headed monster leaves them a little thinner than they would like against a Braves or Cubs lineup that can hit anyone.
The Dodgers have not put a specific timeline on Ohtani. They have not ruled him out either. They are being careful, and that carefulness itself is telling. When Los Angeles is guarded about a superstar’s return, the odds usually break in favor of the more conservative outcome.
For fans, this raises the question of how Ohtani should be used down the stretch. If pitching is off the table, the Dodgers should be maximizing him at the plate every day. He should be hitting cleanup, should be locked in as the DH, and should be given every at-bat available to him in the last five weeks of the regular season and into the postseason.
The story of Ohtani has always been about doing two things at once. If, for now, he can only do one, he should do it every game. And Los Angeles should hope that whatever is keeping him off the mound is a short-term concern rather than something that lingers into October.
The MVP conversation just got a lot more interesting. The Dodgers’ October plans just got a lot more complicated.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
