SAN DIEGO — Say what you will about Barry Bonds, but Dodgers manager Dave Roberts offered this compelling description of him: “Very low maintenance.”
He prepared himself every day. If he was healthy, he was playing, and why wouldn’t he? He was the best hitter in baseball.
“With Barry, you just pencil [him] in the lineup and you don’t think anything of it,” said Roberts, his former teammate.
Roberts now manages Shohei Ohtani, who has won the most valuable player award four times. The only person with more MVP awards is Bonds.
You might think Roberts would treat Ohtani the same way as Bonds: If Ohtani is healthy, he is in the lineup.
Instead, on the day he let Ohtani pitch and hit in the same game for the first time in a month, Roberts insisted he would make that decision on a “start by start” basis for the foreseeable future.
That risks turning the question of “Will he hit or not?” from a discussion into a weekly distraction.
Bonds did not pitch, of course. Ohtani is trying to complete his first full season as a pitcher in four years, after elbow surgery in 2023, and he already has thrown more innings this year than he did last year.
“For Shohei, you’re just constantly trying to manage his workload, his health, the surgeries and all that stuff,” Roberts said.
“With Barry, it was really just turnkey. Nothing against Shohei. That’s part of being a two-way player.”
On Wednesday, Ohtani hit a home run and pitched five shutout innings, leading the Dodgers to a 4-0 victory and a series victory over the rival San Diego Padres.
Do the Dodgers risk overthinking this?
Roberts said he believes the team can evaluate the strain on Ohtani without driving him crazy every week wondering whether he is going to hit the next time he pitches.
“I think he understands that it’s fluid,” Roberts said. “I don’t think that there is one model. It should be a read and react thing. I don’t know how the week is going to look after this off day.
“I could change my mind and have him not hit in his next outing, but that’s more on workload and how he feels.”
Consider Wednesday’s outing: it was Ohtani’s shortest start of the season, five innings and 88 pitches of what Roberts and Ohtani agreed was a “grind.” In the first three innings, he retired all nine batters. In his final two innings, he faced 10 batters and five reached base.
In the box score: five scoreless innings.
“I have a pretty high standard as far as performance,” Ohtani said through an interpreter. “It didn’t really match.”
Said Roberts: “I think it’s just another case in point that it’s good for us to be mindful of the workload and just not take that for granted.”
Roberts started asking Ohtani to stop hitting on days he pitched because he was slumping. Ohtani did not necessarily see the connection and, in any case, the slump appears to be over: On the six games of this road trip, Ohtani is batting .478 in six games, with six extra-base hits, six walks, and nine runs batted in.
On Wednesday, on the first pitch of the first game in which he hit and pitched in the same game, Ohtani launched a home run into the Petco Park beach beyond center field.
“I think that he’s very mindful of everything that’s said about him,” Roberts said. “At times, he uses that as motivation to prove people wrong, that he can do something.
“So, yeah, he’s certainly aware of all of it.”
For all the chatter, and for the weeks in which Ohtani at bat was not the Ohtani we have come to expect, his OPS is .885.
In 2022, the last year he pitched a full season, his OPS was .875. He finished second in the American League MVP race to Aaron Judge, who hit 62 home runs.
Ohtani hit 34, and he also put up a 2.33 earned-run average. He leads the majors in ERA this season, at 0.73.
Pencil him in.
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