Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
It’s no secret the Dodgers are built around Shohei Ohtani. He’s the one who makes the lineup go. He has less of an impact on the starting rotation, but that’s partially due to the nature of the position and the great arms who surround him.
Being one of the biggest questions during yesterday’s end-of-season press conference, Andrew Friedman said Ohtani won’t require surgery for any of his ailments. That’s good! He’s not as injured as it looked like on the field (at times). However, Ohtani is going into his age-33 season, and as a fellow old, it (life) doesn’t typically get easier as you age. He has been able to sustain being a two-way player better than anyone we have ever seen. However, injuries caught up with him in 2026 and derailed another MVP campaign.
Ohtani, despite averaging 6.3 innings per start in his first 14 starts, wouldn’t take the mound again due to a lingering bicep and knee injury. It didn’t preclude him from hitting, though, once he stopped pitching, the hitting production didn’t increase.
- Through July 3: .288/.403/.524, 18 HR, 377 PA
- After July 3: .257/.336/.495, 12 HR, 241 PA
In 2024, Ohtani had one of the best individual seasons in baseball history. He was strictly hitting as he recovered from an elbow surgery in September 2023. Once he stopped pitching in 2026, the hope was the offense would increase. It did not, and neither did the team’s offensive production.
The Dodgers struggled offensively after that. They averaged 4.42 runs per game after July 3 after averaging 5.37 runs per game through July 3. A nearly run-per-game decline because the game’s greatest player was anything but. It shows how much the Dodgers focused the lineup around Ohtani, something that should probably be addressed going forward (more on that in future posts).
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So what to do?
The most logical thing to do is to let Ohtani be a full-time designated hitter — as he has been since becoming a Dodger — while limiting his pitching workload. That means we may have seen the most innings Ohtani will throw as a Dodger in a season.
They were forced to do that in 2025, as he was still recovering from surgery after the 2023 season. Ohtani made his Dodger pitching debut on June 16, 2025, and was brought along slowly. He didn’t get to five innings in an outing until Aug. 27 of that year. He finished his season with 11 innings across two starts before throwing three consecutive 6-inning outings in the postseason, before a shortened start in Game 7 of the Series that saw him pitching on three days rest for the first time in his career.
Moving onto 2026, Ohtani began the season in the rotation and was incredible. He averaged 6.3 innings per start through his first seven starts and only failed to complete six innings just once in his 14 starts. That’s the kind of guy the Dodgers need in October, not necessarily in April. Basically, they need to view his pitching contributions the way they do Blake Snell and, to a lesser extent, Tyler Glasnow. Snell’s has been due to injury, as has Glasnow’s.
Snell has thrown 104 regular-season innings as a Dodger over the last two seasons, with another 43 2/3 coming in the postseason. He was really good in the 2025 postseason and delivered mixed results this year (though, was cruising in Game 3 before the wheels came off), but having him healthy for October was the key. And that’s a way the Dodgers can and have used their financial advantage. Not many teams could weather the loss of a 2-time Cy Young Award winner in the rotation because he’s the ace for a lot of other teams, and other teams choose not to invest as much in player personnel as the Dodgers.
Having Ohtani’s pitching prowess for 50-80 innings in the summer months and the postseason is far more valuable to the Dodgers than 85 regular-season innings through early July and nothing afterward. He may never throw 100 innings in a season ever again, and that’d be OK. But knowing what we know of Ohtani, he’s going to do everything he can to be that ace and .900 OPS hitter — at the same time.
The Dodgers may give him another chance to do so, but if it ends the way it did this season, a more modified pitching regiment could be on tap. But the most valuable part of his game to the Dodgers is his bat and presence in the lineup. That needs to be the primary focus — or the Dodgers need to retool the lineup around him to make them a little less reliant on him being a 50-home run guy.
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Yes, it’s hard to account for injuries, even to a seemingly superhuman Ohtani. However, he’s aging and, despite everything he does to keep his body in peak form, time is undefeated. He might have to adjust his own expectations to remain the most valuable baseball player in the world. No one else is even attempting the two-way thing much anymore. And it seems the braintrust has a plan (that they’re yet to reveal) — even if it’s not perfect, because no perfect plan exists for someone like Ohtani. The best thing everyone involved can do is make sure Ohtani is the healthiest version of himself. Everything else will fall into place as it’s supposed to.
Ohtani is a unicorn. Always has been, always will be. Managing a unicorn is complicated, but the Dodgers have the people in place to do so. And Ohtani’s willingness to be managed makes the job just a little bit easier.
