The Dodgers Have Hit Pause on Shohei Ohtani’s Pitching

Jon Endow-Imagn Images NEW YORK — Earlier this season, Shohei Ohtani appeared to have a legitimate shot at adding a Cy Young Award to a trophy case that already includes four MVP honors plus the AL Rookie of the Year. Fully recovered from his late-2023 ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, he consistently pitched deep into games and carried an ERA below 1.00 into June. Yet, after being knocked around a bit last month, he was scratched from his final start before the All-Star break, and bypassed the All-Star Game itself in favor of receiving an injection of lubricant in his left knee. Prior to the opener of Sunday’s doubleheader at Yankee Stadium, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts revealed that Ohtani — who wasn’t scheduled to pitch during the three-game series in the Bronx — would be scratched from his upcoming start and would take an indefinite break from pitching. “Where we’re at right now, how we’re proceeding, I would say that it’s going to be some time,” Roberts said. “I’d say that it’s not going to be a day-to-day thing.” The break from pitching will not affect Ohtani’s availability as a designated hitter. His left knee is his landing leg for pitching, which he does right-handed, but it’s his back leg for hitting, which he does left-handed. “It’s the pitching and the torque on landing on that leg that kind of gets it upset,” the manager said. “The hitting doesn’t do that.” Though he’s fallen off a bit in recent weeks, Ohtani is batting .287/.396/.534 with 22 home runs (tied for fifth in the National League) and a 150 wRC+ (third). His combined 6.0 WAR (3.1 on the offensive side, 3.0 on the pitching side, with some rounding) leads the majors, a hair ahead of Pete Crow-Armstrong. Ohtani’s knee problem first came to light during a June 11 game at a PNC Park against the Pirates, when he was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the top of the seventh inning, having already gone 2-for-2 with a homer and a pair of walks. While on base in the fourth, he attempted a stolen base on a pitch Andy Pages fouled off, and felt pain behind his left knee. He sat out a game, but was back in the lineup on June 13 against the White Sox, homering in his third straight game. He took his next start, on June 17 against the Rays, but allowed a season-high four earned runs, and has played 24 of the Dodgers’ 26 games since then, with the two games he missed — on June 19 and July 4 — coming after ones he pitched. During that span, Ohtani was named to his sixth All-Star team after receiving more votes than any other player in either league. He was voted in as the NL’s starting DH, but was not additionally selected as a pitcher; he has not taken the mound in a Midsummer Classic since starting the 2021 game for the AL while he was with the Angels. The Dodgers then scratched Ohtani from his scheduled July 11 start against the Diamondbacks, citing ongoing left knee irritation and announcing that he would skip the All-Star Game for the first time in his career. Ohtani told Japanese media at the time that the discomfort was “more in the kneecap” — the same kneecap on which he had season-ending surgery in September 2019 to fuse a bipartite patella, a rare congenital condition. “I wonder,” said Ohtani at the time when asked if his current issues were related to that surgery, later adding that after starts, “The degree to which I could straighten or bend my knee is limited” due to inflammation. You Aren't a FanGraphs Member It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. 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Don't be a victim of FOMO. 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. Ohtani DH’d in both the July 11 game from which he was scratched as a pitcher and on July 12, after which he received an injection of Orthovisc, a natural lubricant used to relieve knee pain. After resting during the break, he was back in action with the rest of the Dodgers on Friday night at Yankee Stadium. It was the first matchup between the two teams in the Bronx since Game 5 of the 2024 World Series, which proved to be the clincher after the Yankees squandered a 5-0 lead following starter Gerrit Cole’s failure to cover first base on an infield grounder by Mookie Betts. Coincidentally enough, Cole — who missed all of the 2025 season and the start of this one after undergoing Tommy John surgery — was Friday night’s starter. He and reliever Fernando Cruz held Ohtani hitless in four plate appearances, though the slugger did hit two balls hard against the former Cy Young winner, one of them a towering 108-mph drive that right fielder Jasson Domínguez caught with his back against the wall in right-center field. The Dodgers won that game 2-1 behind a stellar start from Roki Sasaki and a titanic two-run homer by Max Muncy. Cole pitched well, but overstayed his welcome, with Yankees manager Aaron Boone electing to let him face Muncy after issuing a leadoff walk to Betts to start the seventh. With Saturday night’s game rained out, on Sunday the two teams — which have met in the World Series 12 times — played just their second doubleheader since regular season interleague play began in 1997. Roberts’ announcement regarding Ohtani was initially presented in the context of the need to reshuffle the team’s pitching plans, with Sunday night’s scheduled starter, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, moved to the first game in hopes that he could provide enough length to facilitate a bullpen game in the nightcap, and Emmet Sheehan, Saturday’s scheduled starter — and one who has struggled lately — pushed to Monday. “The elephant in the room is Shohei’s not gonna start on Wednesday. We just want to continue to give him the best chance to kind of get into a good spot,” said Roberts. While Ohtani could continue pitching at less than 100%, even with the Dodgers again having to cobble together a makeshift rotation due to injuries to Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow, the team entered Monday with majors’ best record at 63-37. A loss to the Phillies (with Sheehan getting shellacked for six runs in 5 1/3 innings) and a win by the Brewers (63-37) allowed Milwaukee to pull ahead by half a game. Still, the Dodgers own an 11 1/2-game lead in the NL West, while the five other division leaders’ combined margin over their closest competitors is just 12 games. “A lot of it is where we’re at and how we put ourselves in a good spot,” said Roberts about the opportunity to give Ohtani some rest now. Overall, Ohtani has pitched to a 1.79 ERA and a 2.61 FIP in 85 2/3 innings over 14 starts, an average of 6.12 innings per start. By comparison, while he made 14 starts last year, he totaled just 47 innings (3.36 per start) because his pitch count build-up was done at the major league level, keeping him on a short leash. He pitched six innings just once during the regular season while posting a 2.87 ERA and a 1.90 FIP, though he did go six in three of his four postseason starts. This season, Ohtani has lasted at least six innings all but once; he went five innings on May 20 against the Padres after back-to-back seven-inning starts. Through June 3, he had a 0.74 ERA in 61 innings, but since then, he’s been hit for a 4.38 ERA in 24 2/3 innings. His fielding-independent peripherals and his contact stats across those two stretches are more similar than those ERAs would lead you to believe. It’s the BABIP, baby — specifically a spike of nearly 150 points: Shohei Ohtani Pitching Splits: Through and After June 3 Split IP K% BB% HR/9 BABIP ERA xERA FIP Through June 3 61.0 28.8% 7.7% 0.30 .197 0.74 2.45 2.41 Since June 10 24.2 26.2% 7.5% 0.73 .343 4.38 3.32 3.10 Total 85.2 27.9% 7.6% 0.42 .244 1.79 2.70 2.61 Both ERA estimators favor the first 10 starts, but not by that much; Ohtani allowed two homers in each span, with his rate in the second one still more than respectable. The hits have been falling in lately, and there’s been a fair bit of regression relative to his expected stats: Ohtani Pitching Splits: Through and After June 3, Statcast Version Split EV Brl% HH% AVG xBA SLG xSLG wOBA xwOBA Through June 3 87.6 3.5% 37.5% .144 .186 .211 .268 .204 .244 Since June 10 87.0 4.3% 26.1% .263 .233 .379 .330 .315 .283 Total 87.4 3.8% 33.8% .181 .201 .263 .287 .239 .257 Where Ohtani was 57 points below his xSLG and 40 points below his xwOBA through June 3, he’s been 49 points above the former and 32 points above the latter since then. It hasn’t been a matter of diminished velocity or stuff. If anything, his velocity has trended upwards a bit: That’s an average four-seam velocity of 97.8 mph through June 3, compared to 98.8 since. By PitchingBot, his 61 BotStf score, 53 BotCmd score, and 59 BotOvr score over those last four starts are all one point higher than those of his first 10 turns. Obviously, the results have changed somewhat, but it hasn’t been due to a big drop in the quality of his pitches or his command. Ohtani has qualified for the ERA title just once, in 2022, when he threw 166 innings and put up a 2.33 ERA, good for fourth in the league. He threw 130 1/3 innings in 2021 and 132 innings in ’23, and thanks to the Dodgers’ six-day rotation, he was on pace to exceed that only slightly before the team hit pause. He’s second in the NL in ERA among pitchers with at least 80 innings, but everybody else in the top 10 except Zack Wheeler has at least 14 2/3 more innings: NL ERA leaders, Minimum 80 Innings *Not enough innings to qualify for official ERA lead. Even had Ohtani remained available and similarly effective the rest of the way, winning a Cy Young would have been a tall order if he ended up, say, 50 innings behind Misiorowski. Despite his lack of innings, his 3.0 pitching WAR ties him with Yamamoto for sixth in the league. Yamamoto pitched brilliantly during Sunday’s doubleheader opener, throwing a 102-pitch complete game in an 8-2 victory. He scattered four hits and allowed two runs while striking out seven without a walk. While he threw two complete games during the 2025 postseason, this was his first in the regular season since coming stateside for the ’24 campaign. It was the first regular season complete game by a Dodger since Gavin Stone spun a four-hit shutout on June 26, 2024 against the White Sox, and the first complete game by a Dodger against the Yankees in New York since Burt Hooton threw one in Game 2 of the 1977 World Series. The Dodgers lost the nightcap of the doubleheader, 2-1, while using six additional relievers behind opener Will Klein. Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s eighth-inning solo shot off the last of them, Evan Phillips, answered Tommy Edman’s pinch homer in the top of the frame, providing the margin of victory. Yamamoto has made 18 starts for the Dodgers, pitching to a 2.78 ERA and a 3.33 FIP. Both he and Wrobleski, whose breakout has been one of the team’s most pleasant surprises, made the NL All-Star team, but beyond those two and Ohtani, the rotation’s performance has been erratic. A new splitter and some mechanical adjustments that increased his fastball velocity helped the 24-year-old Sasaki take a big step forward in May and early June, but he came into Friday night’s start having allowed nine home runs and 22 runs in his past 23 innings. Friday’s 5 2/3-inning, one-run effort — an unearned run at that, scored on a passed ball — was fueled by a four-seam fastball that averaged a career-best 100.1 mph thank to further lower-body mechanical adjustments. The outing lowered his ERA to 4.98, with a 5.34 FIP. The 26-year-old Sheehan is carrying a 5.13 ERA and a 4.50 FIP; his home run rate has more than doubled since last season, from 0.86 per nine to 1.75, while his strikeout rate has dropped from 30.6% to 26.4%. As for Snell, shoulder soreness prevented him from making his season debut until May 9, and after pitching just three innings, he exited due to discomfort in his elbow that was diagnosed as loose bodies. He underwent surgery using the same NanoNeedle Scope 2.0 procedure that Dr. Neal ElAttrache had just used on Tarik Skubal. While the use of a smaller needle than the standard one for arthroscopic procedures helped Skubal return to major league action 38 days after surgery, Snell passed the two-month mark on Monday, two days after he threw a 32-pitch, 1 1/3-inning rehab start for Triple-A Oklahoma City. “The stuff was fine, as far as the execution, not great, so we couldn’t get him through two [innings],” Roberts said on Sunday. The Dodgers expect him to make four or five rehab starts to build up his pitch count, putting him on track for a mid-August return. Glasnow posted a 2.72 ERA and a 3.25 FIP though seven outings before leaving his May 6 start after just one inning due to back spasms, and he’s been slow to recover. Not until the weekend before the All-Star break did he return to throwing bullpen sessions, a timeline that suggests he won’t begin a rehab stint until August, with a return late in the month or in early September. The rotation’s sixth spot has been filled by Eric Lauer, who was acquired from the Blue Jays for cash considerations on May 17, and who has pitched to a 4.81 ERA and a 6.06 FIP in 76 2/3 innings overall, with a 3.12 ERA and a 5.29 FIP in 40 1/3 innings with the Dodgers. Despite still serving up 1.56 homers per nine rate since the trade (down from 2.72 prior), he’s made four quality starts out of six, not counting six innings of no-hit work following an opener against the Twins on June 22. On Monday in Philadelphia, Roberts said that Ohtani would throw off a mound later this week, but until he’s back in action, the Dodgers will have to fill his spot. Righty Landon Knack, who made 19 starts for the team in 2024–25, has made two relief appearances totaling five innings and five runs allowed since returning from an intercostal strain. Prospect River Ryan, who has made eight starts totaling 36 1/3 innings at Triple-A Oklahoma City in his return from 2024 Tommy John surgery, is on the injured list due to a hamstring strain and won’t be an option in the near future. With Stone and Bobby Miller are currently on the 60-day injured list, the Dodgers probably need to tap a starter from beyond their current 40-man roster unless they stick to bullpen games. All of which will continue to fuel speculation that they’ll make a run at trading for Skubal, who has put up a 2.97 ERA and a 3.66 FIP in seven starts totaling 39 1/3 innings since returning from surgery, with 1.83 homers per nine offsetting a 30.5% strikeout rate and 3.4% walk rate. If the Tigers (47-53) decide to retain the two-time Cy Young winner and pending free agent, the Dodgers still figure to deal for an additional starter of the August 3 trade deadline. The Dodgers have built a considerable cushion in order to withstand these injuries, including Ohtani’s latest ailment, and the good news is that they still have one of the best hitters on the planet leading off for them. Still, after a stretch that was about as Peak Ohtani as we’ve seen, the baseball world is back to waiting for the best player on the planet to return to full health.