Dodgers Are About to Test Shohei Ohtani’s Seemingly Limitless Boundaries

TORONTO — He was one of the first ones dressed and out of the clubhouse. Outfitted in a loose-fitting pinstriped grey suit with a cream-colored silk T-shirt, Shohei Ohtani flung a soft black bag over his shoulder and wore a black baseball cap backward to complete the Paris runway look that fairly screamed insouciance. His jacket billowed behind him appropriately like a cape. He was out the door of the Dodgers’ clubhouse on Halloween night to prepare for yet another date with history, of which he has more already than David McCullough.

How much more effort can the Dodgers ask of him? How much more greatness can we demand from him? How much more history can one man write?

If there are boundaries to the wonder of Ohtani, we have not discovered them. But the greatest test of those limits likely will come in Game 7 of the 121st World Series Sunday night against the Blue Jays.

Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts wasn’t ready to announce specifics about his Game 7 pitching plan, but Ohtani, he said, “is certainly going to be a part” of it. Because the only way to assure Ohtani’s bat remains in the lineup is to use him as a starting pitcher, not a reliever, he could very well be Roberts’s Game 7 starting pitcher.

On three days of rest. After throwing 93 pitches in Game 4 just 17 hours after reaching base nine times and fighting through body cramps in an 18-inning marathon. After 65 innings pitched coming off a second elbow surgery while throwing more 100 mph pitches than every pitcher with at least 15 starts except Hunter Greene and Tarik Skubal. After taking 801 plate appearances, fifth most ever. After hitting 63 home runs and stealing 20 bases, the first 60-20 player in an extended season. After scoring 158 runs. Against 41-year-old Max Scherzer, who will be the oldest of the 90 pitchers to ever start a World Series Game 7 and who will have started more double-elimination games (six) than any pitcher in history.

If that doesn’t get your blood pumping, get thee to a cardiologist stat.

“I mean, it doesn’t make sense,” said Dodgers lefthander Justin Wrobleski, who provided one of three scoreless but scary innings of relief by the Los Angeles bullpen to save a 3–1 win for Yoshinobu Yamamoto and set the stage for the greatest Game 7 matchup since Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling went at it in 2001. (Yes, even better than Scherzer vs. Zack Greinke in 2019).

Wrobleski is a guy who survived Tommy John surgery, a broken nose, getting cut from the first of three college teams, a season wiped out by COVID-19 and 28 days without pitching entering the World Series only to get meaningful outs with his team facing elimination. What doesn’t make sense even to a pitching survivor like himself, he said, is that a pitcher could be taking the ball for Game 7 after playing for 6 ½ hours Monday, throwing into the seventh inning Tuesday, going 0-for-4 Wednesday and scoring the winning run Friday after the Blue Jays didn’t have their ace, Kevin Gausman, dare pitch to him.

“Nothing makes sense with that guy,” Wrobleski said. “He’s a … I’m not sure if he’s a robot or an alien or, or which one he is, but we will find out eventually. But no, it’s crazy! He’s a special, special player. Special, special dude. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if he takes the ball tomorrow.

“I wouldn’t be surprised about whatever he does any time, whatever it is.”

After six innings of that Game 4 start, on a hot night after the most exhausting night of baserunning the World Series has ever seen, Ohtani, who almost never gets lengthy breaks the way most pitchers do because he must prepare for his next at-bat, was approached by pitching coach Mark Prior.

“Got one more inning?” Prior asked.

“I’ve got three,” Ohtani said with dead seriousness.

Says Roberts, when asked about his concerns handing the ball to Ohtani, “Zero. I mean, not zero, but it’s just watching him. He’s like, ‘Whenever I pitch, if I just pitch and I’m feeling good, I can keep going.’” I run a hypothetical past Roberts.“You know Shohei better than anyone,” I say to him.

“I do. I do.”

“If he’s got the ball in his hands, Game 7, to start …”

“He’s going to go.”

“…the confidence level is 100 percent?”

“One hundred percent.  I’m going to watch the game and I’m not going to … there’s no pitch counts. Just watching how it looks.”

The Dodgers planned for this eventuality. The rest of the world just assumed Tyler Glasnow was starting Game 7. But Roberts texted Glasnow after Game 4.

“You’re not going to pitch tomorrow [Game 5] but be ready for Game 6.”

The Game 7 starter normally would be in the dugout for Game 6. Glasnow watched Game 6 with his spikes on from the bullpen, where he would be needed to play a huge part in one of the wilder endings to a World Series game.

The Dodgers made three third-inning runs stand up, barely. With two outs and a runner on second base in the third, Toronto manager John Schneider ordered Gausman to intentionally walk Ohtani, even though Ohtani was 0-for-8 with four strikeouts since his exhausting Game 3. Will Smith followed with an RBI double.

Gausman pitched too carefully to Freddie Freeman and walked him, perhaps knowing the ice-cold Mookie Betts (3-for-24) was up next. The Blue Jays throughout the series had blown away Betts with fastballs in the zone, a pitch diet he normally devours. He hit .339 on the season against in-zone heaters with an average launch angle of 17°. But in the World Series, Betts kept dipping underneath those pitches, getting his head and torso too far in front of his feet and falling across the plate on his follow-through after a boatload of pop-ups and routine flyballs. He was hitting .100 against Toronto’s in-zone fastballs with an absurdly high 41° launch angle.

With the count 1-and-1, Gausman threw a high fastball. Betts swung under it.

The next pitch was another high fastball. Betts swung under that one, too, fouling it back.

Now, Gausman had an almost unhittable splitter in Game 6. It is his favorite pitch to put hitters away. But the Blue Jays saw no reason not to keep pumping fastballs in the zone at Betts.

Gausman threw a third straight heater. Betts this time kept his swing plane flatter and drove the ball on a line through the left side for a two-strike, two-out, two-run dagger of a single. Launch angle: 6°.

“They were just reading the game,” said Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc. “In that spot they probably felt like they had done enough damage throughout the game with the split, and they thought they could get one by him.

“It was just a really good swing. He’s incredibly talented and he is in a good spot. He can do just about anything up there.”

The Dodgers in the ninth would need Glasnow and two high IQ baseball plays from Kiké Hernández to make the runs stand. With one on against Roki Sasaki, Addison Barger smashed a long fly ball to center. Improbably, the ball lodged between the ground and the padding of the wall. As center fielder Justin Dean raced after it, he turned and looked over his left shoulder. He saw and heard Hernández, the hustling left fielder, throwing his arms up and declaring “Dead ball!” Dean took his cue and immediately did likewise, thus rendering the play immediately dead, stopping the runners at second and third.

Roberts summoned Glasnow. Incredibly, the game was over three pitches later. Ernie Clement popped out on the first pitch. With Andrés Giménez batting, coach Dino Ebel, who positions the Dodgers outfielders, got the attention of Hernández and rubbed his hands up and down his chest, the signal to play shallow. The Dodgers all series have played Giménez shallow to the opposite field.

Two pitches later, Giménez drove a pitch to left field that initially looked like a run-scoring single. But Hernández’s shallow positioning made it easy for him to get there on the catch. An overeager Barger drifted too far, thinking the ball would not be caught and was doubled up on a quick throw from Hernández. 

It was a historically bad mistake. Barger needed to check the outfielders’ depth before the pitch and understand that even if that ball should have bounced in front of Hernández, he would not have scored. Eagerness and youth cost him. George Springer, one of the greatest sluggers in World Series history, would have been the next batter.

Having thrown only three pitches—though very high-leverage at that—Glasnow could well come back to start Game 7. But this is where the Ohtani Rules, which MLB designed specifically to accommodate his two-way uniqueness, hamstring Roberts and his pitching plans.

If Ohtani starts on the mound and DHs, per usual, he can remain in the game as the DH once removed from pitching. But if he starts as DH and enters the game as a relief pitcher, the Dodgers would lose the DH once Ohtani is removed as a pitcher.

There’s one more complication to using Ohtani in relief. According to Michael Hill, vice president of on-field operations for MLB: Upon the first mound visit to Ohtani as a reliever he must be moved to another position, such as outfield, to keep him in the game, in which case the new pitcher would take the batting spot of the fielder Ohtani replaced.

The Dodgers do not want to be without Ohtani’s bat in any circumstance. The only way to assure that is the case and to use him as a pitcher is to start him on the mound.

It’s been nine years since anyone started World Series Game 7 on three days of rest. That start did not go well for Corey Kluber of Cleveland against the Cubs (six innings, four runs, no strikeouts). The last pitcher to start and win on short rest was Chris Carpenter of St. Louis back in 2011, light years ago when it comes to how the workload for pitchers has changed.

Starting pitchers on three days of rest in the postseason since 2020 are 4–12. Ohtani has started once on three days of rest in MLB: April 21, 2023. But that was coming off a rain-shortened start of just two innings and 30 pitches. He last made a relief appearance in 2023 in the World Baseball Classic final, famously striking out then Angels teammate Mike Trout.

Ohtani is the single greatest engine to the growth of the game over the past few years. He, along with Yamamoto and Sasaki, and the Blue Jays, who are Canada’s team, have made this the most truly world series ever.

Why not have the series and the season come down to one game: Ohtani, on short rest, against Scherzer, the 41-year-old legend. The best player in history in his prime against the most prolific ultimate game pitcher in his twilight.

Before Roberts huddled with his staff, the front office and eventually Ohtani himself, to nail down when Ohtani will pitch in Game 7, he said, “Right now, there’s no wrong answer.”

He is right about that assumption. It’s amazing when you stop and think about it. After taking 801 at-bats and playing in 174 games, 17 of them as a two-way player with a twice-repaired elbow, Ohtani is likely to be pitching the final game of the season on short rest after a start, something no Dodger has done this year. There is no wrong answer—not when the answer is Ohtani.

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