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Possibly mortal.
Wednesday on Jackie Robinson Day, Shohei Ohtani pitched six innings, struck out 10, and did not hit. For the first time since 2021—before the Ohtani Rule changed the game for two-way players—he walked off the mound at the end of the sixth and watched the Dodgers close out the Mets from the dugout.
Load management: In postgame comments manager Dave Roberts at first referenced a hit-by-pitch that Ohtani took on Monday as the reason he didn’t hit. But then Roberts expanded to say that this was “a conversation we broached in the spring.” So the Dodgers have been asking themselves if they really need Ohtani to pitch and hit in the same game. Not because he can't do both, but because the regular season is 162 games and October is the whole point.
Less can sometimes be less: The Angels spent years DH'ing Mike Trout, moving him off center field, managing his legs, and trying to protect him from injury, only to watch him get hurt anyway. And it wasn’t just a physical decline Mentally, the load-managed Trout stopped being himself. This April, he's running, diving, and mashing again. Sometimes you tell a generational player to be smaller, and you get something smaller. The same thing has happened with Byron Buxton (albeit on the All-Star scale rather than the superstar scale). The Twins told him not to run. He complied. He was less. Now in season he's running and defending and doing the things that make him Buxton. When you protect elite athletes from themselves, you can accidentally protect them from their own greatness.
Built different: Ohtani isn't just a great hitter learning to rest his legs; he's a starting pitcher throwing 95+ every fifth day, and an elite DH in between. The workload is genuinely unprecedented. No comp tells you what his body needs in year three of this contract because nobody's done this before. The question is whether managing him costs something that can't be recovered.
Should Shohei hit on days he pitches?
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