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For a few days last week, the Dodgers almost couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
Because, for the first time in his three years with the team, Shohei Ohtani looked like a mere mortal at the plate.
From April 20-25, the four-time MVP had the worst six-game stretch of his Dodgers career, batting 3-for-23 with no extra-base hits and nine strikeouts. Dating back to April 12, he had gone 59 plate appearances without a home run, the longest such drought of his tenure with the club.
During his slump, he was struggling to lay off low pitches or keep from pulling the ball harmlessly to the right side of the infield.
For at least a little while, baseball’s two-way superhero seemed to be fighting some rarely-seen kryptonite, grinding through the kind of stretch to which he’s typically immune.
“You don’t hear the word ‘slump’ correlated with Shohei on the hitting side ever,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts quipped over the weekend.
“We’re all human, we all have our stretches,” added first baseman Freddie Freeman. “But (to see it from Ohtani), it’s definitely weird.”
Indeed, while it’s easy to forget when he’s mashing 450-foot home runs, or blowing 100 mph fastballs past hitters from the mound, or accomplishing statistical feats once thought impossible in baseball’s modern era, even Ohtani has his physical limitations.
And this year, in his return to full-time pitching following a second career Tommy John surgery, he’s getting a renewed –– and potentially telling –– early-season test.
Last week, both Roberts and several teammates noted an inevitable shift in the 31-year-old superstar so far this season. He’s had to put more focus on pitching. He’s had to factor in more between-starts recovery. He’s had to manage his overwhelming workload more delicately than ever before.
“You always feel like it’s gonna be sustainable with him, because he’s a great player, he knows how to prepare,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas said. “But these kind of moments make you realize that baseball is hard. Especially when he does it the way that he’s doing it.”
“When he’s pitching in the normal rotation every week,” Freeman echoed, “it’s a whole different dynamic.”
Different, of course, does not necessarily equate to worse.
On Saturday, Freeman predicted that Ohtani’s recent skid “just means the hot streak (that will follow it) is going to be something we’ve never seen before.”
Right on cue, the slugger collected three hits a day later, belting a 109 mph double and a 110 mph opposite-field home run on Sunday after making a tweak to his batting stance that got him better aligned with his swing.
“Starting yesterday, it started feeling a little better,” Ohtani said in Japanese during a postgame television interview. “I think my stance is the most important thing. Everything starts from there, and if I fix that, I think I can take better at-bats.”
Still, even Ohtani seemed to caution about immediately bouncing back to his typical production levels.
While he’s been known as a somewhat slow opening-month performer (at least relative to his atmospheric norms), his current .262 batting average and .876 OPS would still be the second-worst March/April marks of his nine-year MLB career.
“I just have to be patient a little longer,” he said, “and continue to make improvements.”
It’s a battle that figures to rage on for the duration of this year.
Exactly how much Ohtani himself feels like his pitching is complicating his hitting process remains an unknown (he declined to speak to any other reporters after Sunday’s game).
But over the weekend, Roberts identified that dynamic as a “common sense” factor in Ohtani’s sluggish start.
“There’s gotta be some cuts into some of the bandwidth, the production on the offensive side,” Roberts said Saturday. “What it translates to (regarding) how he’s been swinging the bat the last week, how much of that is the pitching? I don’t have an answer for that. But that’s to be understood, that there’s some kind of cut into production given how much he’s pitching.”
So far, that plan has paid dividends in each of his turns through the rotation. Entering his Tuesday night outing against the Marlins, Ohtani has a 0.38 ERA in four starts, having racked up 25 strikeouts in 24 total innings.
“He is a horse on that mound right now,” Freeman said.
The challenge moving forward will be maintaining such pitching dominance while rediscovering more consistent hitting form.
It’s not a task Freeman envies, noting how even he experiences “some days you walk into that box and you’re just like, ‘Whoa, it feels like I haven’t been in this thing in a while.’”
And that’s without the added burden of making 100-pitch outings on a regular basis.
“When you throw 100 pitches and you throw with that kind of effort,” Roberts said of Ohtani,
“there needs to be more recovery (time behind the scenes).”
None of this means Ohtani is lowering his personal goals. During his scuffle last week, Roberts noticed his frustration through his more stoic facial expressions.
“He has high expectations for himself and his performance,” Roberts said. “So (this is) certainly not up to his standard.”
And while Sunday might’ve marked the start to a widely-expected turnaround, simply one week of mortality was a reminder of the hurdles he’ll face this year.
“He’s gotta navigate a whole ‘nother thing, where the last two years all he had to do was hit,” Freeman said. “Baseball is hard, very hard. Even the greatest players, they can it make it look easy a lot of the time. But there’s a lot of time that it’s not.”
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