HOUSTON — The Dodgers have seen different versions of Shohei Ohtani during his three seasons in Los Angeles.
They’re seeing a new one this year – a slumping Ohtani.
Through Tuesday, Ohtani was hitting .240 with an .814 OPS – numbers that would be career-lows for a full season should they persist that long and the lowest through his team’s first 35 games in a season since 2022. He is hitless in his past 17 at-bats with just one home run in his past 85 plate appearances.
Ohtani’s at-bats looked so uncomfortable Monday night that Dodgers manager Dave Roberts changed direction and decided to keep him out of the lineup Tuesday and only use him as the starting pitcher.
“I think he’s just missing pitches that he should hit. He’s not squaring them up,” Roberts said. “In the last week, I think he’s done a better job of controlling the chase. But now, pitches in the hitting zone I just think (he’s) getting them off the end, getting beat on fastballs. Things like that, when he’s right, just doesn’t happen.”
Roberts said he believes the extended slow start is directly related to the four-time league MVP taking on a full pitching workload for the first time since 2023.
“I do,” he said. “With pitching there’s the day of the start, what it takes on your mind in the box, the day after you’re hitting, the tax on your body and what you endured the day before, your outing. So that affects your hitting. That’s two days there.
“I feel very good about writing Shohei’s name in the lineup every time. But I do think what he’s done on the pitching side, how well he’s pitched, there’s been a little bit of fallback or whatever on the hitting. But I do think it will correct itself as time goes on.”
The toll is two-fold. The time Ohtani has to put into his pitching preparation takes away from the time where he could “go full bore working on his swing, grinding through it to right himself when his mechanics aren’t where they should be,” Roberts said. And there is also the simple fatigue of throwing 90-100 pitches every six days.
That could be showing in Ohtani’s bat speed. By Statcast measurement, Ohtani is averaging 74.8 mph this season, a mark that still puts him in the 82nd percentile of MLB hitters. But it is down a full mile per hour from last season and almost 3 mph from 2023 (the first year Statcast bat speed measurements are publicly available) when he ranked in the 99th percentile.
Ohtani was also pitching full-time in 2023 when he averaged 77.4 mph on his swings. But he was also three years younger.
“I haven’t noticed it,” Roberts said of the drop in bat speed so far this year. “That could probably play into the fact that he’s getting beat on some pitches. But if you say that … then is that a sign of a little bit of fatigue in there?”
When setting Ohtani’s two-way schedule to keep him at full strength as much as possible, Roberts said “anything should be on the table” – including giving him a full day off from both pitching and hitting occasionally.
“It’s certainly up for consideration,” he said. “But again, I don’t know what the right answer is, outside of not playing him. Because we’re better when he’s in the lineup. He’s still a presence. There’s no pitcher out there that would not prefer to have him not in the lineup. But everything is on the table.”
What isn’t on the table is any discussion of whether this is worth it to the Dodgers. Are Ohtani’s pitching contributions worth a dropoff in his offensive production?
“I try not to get too far in the weeds on that. Because it’s moot,” Roberts said. “He’s going to do both. He’s one of our best pitchers. He’s one of our best hitters. So I don’t spend too much time on it. It’s a good exercise for others. But not for me.”
REHAB REPORT
Kiké Hernandez began his minor-league rehabilitation assignment with Triple-A Oklahoma City on Tuesday night, playing third base for five innings and going 1 for 3 with a double. It was Hernandez’s first game action since last year’s World Series.
Hernandez is recovering from elbow surgery last fall and is on the 60-day injured list, so his rehab assignment will be an extended one. He is not eligible to be activated from the IL until May 24.
UP NEXT
Dodgers (RHP Tyler Glasnow, 3-0, 2.56 ERA) at Astros (RHP Lance McCullers Jr., 2-2, 6.32 ERA), Wednesday, 11:10 a.m. PT, SportsNet LA, 570 AM