PITTSBURGH — For six innings on Thursday night Shohei Ohtani was the best version of himself, and then he was gone, and for a Dodgers team that has spent the spring losing arms it could not spare, the seventh inning at PNC Park arrived like a held breath. Ohtani left the game with left knee inflammation, replaced by pinch hitter Santiago Espinal, and a routine June win turned instantly into a vigil over the most valuable player in the sport.
The reassurance came quickly, and from the right person. Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager, said his level of concern was “not high” and called the removal “proactive.” Ohtani, he explained, first felt something after a stolen-base attempt on what turned out to be a foul ball, the kind of sequence that produces a tweak rather than a tear. Roberts located the trouble “behind the knee, little hamstring,” said the team “just wanted to be smart and not push it,” and indicated he felt good about Ohtani being in the lineup on Friday, pending how the knee responds to the flight to Chicago.
What made the exit jarring was everything that preceded it. Ohtani reached base all four times he came up, going 2-for-2 with two walks and launching his 13th home run of the season in the third inning, according to Sports Illustrated. A player does not usually walk off looking that productive, which is exactly why the bench emptied its caution onto the situation rather than its hope.
The numbers underneath the scare explain the panic. Ohtani is hitting .305 with a .964 OPS and had been on a .407 tear over his previous 15 games, and he has been doing the other half of the job too, carrying a 1.06 ERA across 67.2 innings and 11 starts on the mound. He is not a star the Dodgers can rest for a week and replace with depth. He is two players in one uniform, and an injury to either one is an injury to a roster spot the team has no way to backfill.
That is the context that turns a low-grade knee tweak into a story. The Dodgers’ season has already been defined by the training room. Blake Snell’s elbow and Tyler Glasnow’s repeated trips to the injured list have hollowed out a rotation that was supposed to be the deepest in baseball. A team that has spent two months absorbing pitching losses cannot also lose the bat, and arm, at the center of its lineup.
For now the Dodgers are choosing to believe Roberts, and the early signs support him. A player removed for a torn ligament does not get described as probable for the next night’s lineup. The likeliest version of this story is a day or two of caution and a quiet return, the same proactive management that has kept Ohtani’s two-way workload sustainable all season.
But the Dodgers have been wrong about knees and elbows before this year, often enough that the optimism comes with a flinch. What the team does not yet know is how the knee feels after a night’s sleep and a flight, and whether a player who pitches and hits can be trusted to throttle himself when the calendar says October is the only month that matters. Friday in Chicago will give the first answer. The rest of the summer will give the real one.
