Shohei Ohtani Might Also Be Too Hurt To Hit

As special and precious as Shohei Ohtani is, it makes sense that he’s delicate. Both the Dodgers and the Angels before them have handled Ohtani with padded tongs: six-man rotations, pitch counts, a full-time DH role. Ohtani has played just 8 1/3 career innings in the outfield, even though he clearly has the legs and arms to play center.

It hasn’t mattered. For spurts lasting a season or two at most, Ohtani has held up, but he’s needed two UCL surgeries in an American pro career of nine seasons and only 644 1/3 innings on the mound, including the playoffs and the World Baseball Classic. Nolan Ryan has an innings-to-ligaments ratio more than 25 times Ohtani’s. It’s not great.

Ohtani’s throwing elbow seems to be in good repair, for a change, but the rest of his body is letting him down. The four-time MVP was in the midst of the best pitching season of his career at the midway point, with a 1.79 ERA and 95 strikeouts in 85 2/3 innings. He’d completed at least six innings in 13 of his 14 starts. The one exception was no letdown; he went five scoreless with four strikeouts against the Padres on May 20, but needed 88 pitches to do so.

But Ohtani hasn’t thrown a competitive pitch since July 3. He skipped the All-Star Game two weeks later. I assumed at the time that he was too afraid to face a Philadelphia crowd that had booed him lustily the previous October, but no, Ohtani’s injury problems are real. The party line is that Ohtani is unable to pitch because of left knee discomfort, but take your pick: He’s also dealt with nagging injuries to his neck and right biceps. If Ohtani were a gingerbread man, he’d have bite marks in more than half of his appendages. (Keep an eye on his gumdrop buttons.)

The Dodgers had hoped to ramp Ohtani up in order to prepare him to pitch in the playoffs, but those efforts have come to naught. He threw his last bullpen on August 28, and his biceps started barking. On September 2, he recorded a golden sombrero against the Cardinals and appeared in visible discomfort. Over the weekend, manager Dave Roberts conceded that even if Ohtani were magically healed overnight, there isn’t enough time left before the playoffs to ramp him back up to start.

After a four-game absence, Ohtani returned to the lineup on Monday, went 0-for-3 with a walk and a strikeout, and confirmed that he would be a designated hitter only for the rest of the season.

The best-case scenario for Ohtani is for him to serve as an elite starting pitcher and an elite power hitter at the same time, which he famously did last postseason. In the NLCS clincher against the Brewers, Ohtani started and threw six scoreless innings, while chipping in a walk and three solo home runs at the plate. It was, by some margin, the best single-game performance in the history of the MLB postseason.

But all is not lost. The Dodgers needed every inning and every hit they could get from Ohtani last year as they won the World Series by a sliver. But in 2024, Ohtani didn’t throw a pitch all year and the Dodgers won it all anyway.

This is a crazy thing to say about a guy who was second in the NL in ERA and fourth in WAR on July 1, but: I don’t think they’re going to miss him in the rotation at all. Last year’s World Series MVP, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, remains unhittable and rubber-armed. Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow — both unhittable but distinctly not rubber-armed — returned to the rotation in August and resumed normal service. And for a no. 4 starter, Los Angeles went out and got some guy from Detroit at the deadline.

I have no doubt that Roberts will connive to do something ludicrous with his high-leverage bullpen this October, as he always does. But as for the rotation — Ohtani’s usual province — the Dodgers have plenty of cover.

But Ohtani’s bat didn’t go back to full strength when he announced he was no longer pitching this season. This is one of many respects in which baseball is unlike Red Dead Redemption.

The last time we saw full-time DH Ohtani with at least three fully functioning limbs, he hit .310/.390/.646 with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases in 2024. But the injuries that have kept Ohtani off the mound are also hampering him at the plate.

Ohtani’s full-season wRC+, 143, is basically tied for his worst since 2020. And that’s being floated by a hot first half.

I don’t want to understate the difference between the Ohtani of the first three months of the season and the Ohtani of the ensuing two months and change. A wRC+ of 158 would rank third out of 140 qualified hitters, trailing Yordan Alvarez and Pete Crow-Armstrong. A wRC+ of 119 would rank 47th, tied with Sal Stewart and (speaking of the Dodgers’ injury problems) Andy Pages.

That said, Stewart and Pages are good players! They were both All-Stars this year. Over… let’s call it 20 plate appearances over a five-game division series, the difference between the two Ohtanis is a little more than one single. But it’s nothing special for a DH. Out of 20 qualified hitters who have primarily played DH, Ohtani is 11th in wRC+ since July 1. Small sample and all (Kyle Schwarber is 13th and nobody’s worried about him in the slightest), but with Ohtani’s body being one gastrointestinal butterfly short of a game of Operation, he’s no longer hitting like the Indomitable God-Emperor of Baseball. He’s hitting like a regular guy.

And there’s more.

This is Ohtani’s rolling average bat speed over a 50-plate appearance span. You want to know why he’s so good? It’s because of that gorgeous, Griffeyesque lefty power stroke. In 2023, the first year Baseball Savant had bat tracking data, Ohtani was second in the league in average bat speed. The only guy ahead of him was Giancarlo Stanton, who can swing a steel girder faster than most people can swing a bat. Among mortals, Ohtani had the fastest bat in the league.

In 2024, he was eighth. Last year, he was 16th out of 225 qualified hitters, which is still terrific. Junior Caminero, Nick Kurtz, and James Wood were not on this leaderboard in 2023, so I wouldn’t read too much into those rankings.

This year, Ohtani is 41st in bat speed, out of 201 qualified batters. The y-axis on that bat speed graph isn’t especially friendly to the point I was going to make, so I’ll just spell it out. On July 24, Ohtani’s rolling 50-PA average bat speed went below his previous career low and stayed there for the rest of the month. Ohtani started swinging the bat harder in August, but in the past week that average dropped from 75.3 mph to 74.0.

Here are various swing speed and batted ball metrics from Ohtani in three time frames: until the All-Star break; from the break to his last bullpen session, when he tweaked his biceps; and since that last bullpen.

In case you didn’t believe Roberts, various Dodgers executives who have spoken on the record about this, or Ohtani himself: He’s hurt.

Healthy full-time DH Ohtani is an MVP-type player. Ohtani’s aggregate numbers over the past two months have him as a more limited hitter, but still comfortably above average. The Dodgers, for all their vast resources, have a ton of holes in the lineup. Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernández aren’t playing up to their brand reputations; both are in their second straight season of league-average offense. Will Smith just got back from a three-month layoff caused by an inflamed disc in his neck; he’s still getting back up to speed, and hit just .118 in his first seven games since coming off the IL. And the less said about Kyle Tucker, the better.

What would the Dodgers stand to lose by putting Ohtani on restricted minutes — or even the IL — over the final weeks of the season? Quite a bit, if the Ohtani available to them is capable of a 120 wRC+. Their lead in the NL West is unassailable, but their lead over the Braves for the no. 2 seed in the NL is nothing of the sort. That no. 2 seed comes with a first-round bye — i.e., a free pass through the deadly chaos of the Wild Card round, plus the ability to set up their rotation for the NLDS. That’s a huge thing to play for.

But the Ohtani of the past two weeks is not helping. In this diminished state, I’m not convinced Ohtani is of much more use to the Dodgers than Alex Freeland, who can at least play second base. Had the Dodgers not used Ohtani on Monday, they could have placed him on the IL retroactively and be a third of the way (as a two-way player, Ohtani faces a 15-day minimum IL stint) toward getting him back.

Now, they just have to cross their fingers, and hope Ohtani doesn’t find a way to injure those too.