Shohei Ohtani is 3-for-20 with zero extra-base hits this postseason, and the Los Angeles Dodgers are discussing benching him for Game 3 of the NLCS.
Down 0-2 to the Milwaukee Brewers after a 7-4 Game 2 loss, Dave Roberts didn’t dodge the question before the series shifts back to Dodger Stadium on Wednesday. He told reporters, as DodgerBlue reported, that he’s having a direct conversation with his $700 million two-way superstar about what comes next.
“Yeah I mean obviously it hasn’t been good. He doesn’t feel great. I think for me, it’s having a conversation with him tomorrow, kind of try to figure out what’s best for him, what’s best for us.”
That’s a manager publicly preparing the room for an answer he already suspects, not a question he’s still asking.
The number behind this conversation is uglier than one bad series. Ohtani finished the regular season on an 18-game nosedive, hitting .157/.289/.214 with three extra-base hits and 29 strikeouts, a stretch that MLB Trade Rumors noted carried straight into October. He hasn’t hit a home run since August 18 in Colorado, 20 games and 80 at-bats without one.
Game 2 was the breaking point. Ohtani went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts, his first postseason game without reaching base all October. Add a left knee that has kept him off the mound since early June, a bicep issue that landed him on the 15-day injured list in mid-September, and a lineup slot that now reads like a liability more than a luxury, and the benching conversation stops being speculation.
None of this is happening in isolation. The Dodgers’ offense has looked flat all October, and the one hitter built to carry a slump is the one buried in the worst slump on the roster.
I’ve read that Roberts quote four times now, and it still sounds like a man rehearsing the explanation before he’s made the decision.
This is the part that should bother the Dodgers more than the box score. The roster was built around the idea that no team in the sport could do what Ohtani does, pairing an MVP-caliber bat with a front-of-rotation arm in the same lineup slot, the premise that made a $700 million contract make basic baseball sense in the first place. Two games from getting swept out of the NLCS, that premise is the thing on the examination table.
If Ohtani sits Wednesday, 21-year-old Josue De Paula likely makes his first career playoff start at DH. That’s not a small ask for a rookie in a win-or-go-home environment, but it says something about where the Dodgers are that it’s even on the table. The knee issue that shut him down earlier this year never fully went away, it just stopped being the headline once the bat started working. The internet noticed before the Dodgers confirmed any of it.
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/2109863972665180315
The reaction is the same disbelief a fanbase feels watching its $700 million answer to every question become, for one series, the question itself. Milwaukee hasn’t been back to the World Series since a seven-game loss to the Cardinals in 1982, and if that drought ends because the best player alive had to come out of the lineup, nobody will let the Dodgers forget it.
A $700 million bet is only unprecedented until it isn’t working.
