The Dodgers have a Shohei Ohtani problem.
That’s weird because normally he’s everybody else’s problem. This man has been terrorizing pitchers and hitters across baseball for years.
But biceps, knee and neck ailments have taken the ball out of Ohtani’s hand this season. And now, anyone who says they haven’t wondered whether the Dodgers should also take the bat out of his hands is lying.
It’s not going to happen, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said after Sunday’s 3-2 loss to the Atlanta Braves, which evened the best-of-five National League Division Series 1-1 heading back to Atlanta for Game 3 on Tuesday.
“He’ll be in there Game 3,” Roberts said of Ohtani, the four-time league MVP and much-celebrated unicorn. “We’ve just got to, again, take good at-bats and expect the best.”
Except anyone watching actually is expecting the worst from Ohtani’s at-bats.
He can’t be right, can he? He’s so much better than this.
Though Roberts reminded us once more: “This time of year … no one feels perfect.”
Still, Roberts also said, “I haven’t heard anything other than he feels fine. So I don’t know if he’s trying to do too much because he doesn’t feel perfect.”
Ohtani has been far from that. In his final 18 games of the regular season, he hit .157 with an on-base-plus-slugging percentage of .503. He struck out 29 times in 70 at-bats. He hasn’t hit a home run since Aug. 18 and has only one RBI in that span.
He has two singles in the NLDS, but he’s otherwise chasing pitches and chasing his normal self. Turning himself into a pretzel, corkscrewing himself into the dirt.
At this point, it’s cause for celebration when Ohtani simply slaps a single, as he did in the fifth inning Sunday when he poked Dylan Lee’s 95-mph four-seam fastball into left field for his only hit. We’ll take it, take him taking what the pitcher gives him instead of all the flailing and failing we’re seeing.
Because even as a decoy, Ohtani is whiffing badly.
But the Dodgers can’t very well move him down from No. 2 in the order; they’d have to move him out of it entirely. Because if they signal that they don’t have faith in him, who in the other dugout is going to fear him?
Not that the charade is working on the Braves, who in the third inning walked Mookie Betts — now the Dodgers’ leadoff man — on four pitches and then got Ohtani to pop out.
Usually Ohtani’s presence in the on-deck circle is enough to strike fear into the other guys. Now it’s the Dodgers’ fans who have an uneasy feeling when they hear those familiar Michael Bublé walk-up notes.
Ohtani isn’t hitting, and he’s not getting anything to hit. He’s doing much of the pitchers’ work for them, swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone, stacking undisciplined and unserious at-bats that are unbecoming of the biggest star on the ballclub with three-peat immortality on the line.
Beside a smattering of promising at-bats in the final week of the season against the San Diego Padres, Ohtani has looked like a man fighting himself — and losing.
“If you look at the at-bats, there’s a lot of chase,” Roberts said. “It’s hard to square up, put good swings on balls that are out of the zone. That’s kind of what it boils down to.”
And …
“Certainly [Chris] Sale is going to be tough,” Roberts said.
Oh, yeah. It’s only going to get tougher. On Tuesday, the Braves will start their ace, against whom Ohtani is three for 15 all time.
Thirty-seven-year-old Freddie Freeman has been fighting to find a groove again too — and he seems to have found it, with three hits in his last seven at-bats, including his first home run since Sept. 2 in Sunday’s loss.
And there’s a school of thought that the Dodgers’ Josue De Paula infusion sparked a late-season fire under Kyle Tucker and Teoscar Hernández.
Could the rookie — who pinch-hit for Tommy Edman and fouled out for the final out Sunday — have a similar impact on Ohtani? Could De Paula possibly do a better impression of Ohtani than Ohtani currently is doing?
We’ll never know. But at this point, we’d sure like to.
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