Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior was worried. But how worried? He couldn’t say at first.
The team had already taken major steps to address Shohei Ohtani’s lingering left knee issue, presenting him with a plan to skip his last start before the All-Star break and have his knee drained that Sunday. And he’d co-signed it.
The swelling in Ohtani’s knee, however, had already been more persistent than the team had first expected. And pitching seemed to irritate it.
“I would say, moderately concerned,” Prior eventually said in a conversation with The Times last weekend. “But no more concerned than I probably am with anybody else who’s had to deal with aches and pains. Hopefully, this break and this rest will get it to calm down a little bit, and then we’ll see where we’re at next weekend.”
Coming out of the All-Star break, the Dodgers face the most pressing question for their second half: Will they be able to manage Ohtani’s knee issue?
Of course, plenty of other questions loom: What approach will the Dodgers take at the trade deadline? Will the pitchers coming off the injured list in the second half provide enough pitching depth? Can they maintain the best record in the majors?
But naturally, Ohtani’s health is tangled up in all those answers.
The Dodgers have enough star power and enough of a lead in the division to still make the playoffs without Ohtani replicating his first half on the mound (8-2, 1.79 ERA). And they showed last year that they can win a World Series even if their postseason path begins with a wild-card series.
They’d prefer, however, to take a different route, with a strong second half that ensures home-field advantage all the way through the postseason.
“At the end of the day, it’s just trying to expect the best of your ball club,” manager Dave Roberts said before the break. “And with the talent that we have, we expect to have the best record in baseball, and so that’s our standard. And so, what falls out of it is x, y and z. So that’s what we’re playing for.”
That’s also what they need a healthy Ohtani for.
Workload is part of the equation, and an aspect that’s garnered plenty of attention in Ohtani’s first full season balancing two-way duties since 2023.
“I’ve been much more open and watching … his workload, and not just taking for granted that he can be a two-way player, take every at-bat, pitch like a normal pitcher,” Roberts said. “I think that would be unfair. So for me, if anything, it’s just, keep having those conversations with him, bringing them to him, and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we see. This might be a different option, a better option for your best interest and our best interest.’ And I think that with that, he’s responded really well.”
That approach will continue in the second half. But refining Ohtani’s mechanics will also be vital to keeping his knee from becoming an issue again.
Ohtani said it himself, through interpreter Will Ireton, last week: “I have to kind of find a way to adjust my mechanics so that my knee doesn’t get affected.”
He’s been trying to do so since the swelling in his knee first cropped up.
“I think we’ve identified the issue,” Prior said. “Sometimes the fix isn’t always the easiest, especially with a guy who doesn’t spend probably the same amount of time on the mechanics of it.”
As a two-way player, Ohtani doesn’t have the “physical bandwidth,” as Prior put it, for things like multiple bullpen sessions between starts, even if they are a week apart. He has to keep the long, grueling season in mind when he’s also in the lineup every day.
Looking back at Ohtani’s start against the Pirates last month, the day before he exited the series finale with inflammation in his left knee, the Dodgers observed him landing a little further across his body, likely putting extra strain on that plant leg as he moved around it.
“He fixed it, and then I’m wondering if it got aggravated just in-game,” Prior said. “These guys are extreme compensators, and in the moment they don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, but they’re finding other ways to pitch, and then afterwards you find out that things are a little sore.”
Ohtani had a dominant first half, but, whether because of the knee issue, or mechanics, or some combination of the two, he wasn’t quite as sharp in his last four starts (4.38 ERA).
“If he can fix the delivery, then he can fix a little bit more of the execution,” Prior said.
But will the delivery adjustment, All-Star break intervention and attention to workload fix Ohtani’s knee at least through the postseason? The Dodgers’ second-half trajectory will be tied up in the answer.
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