The Los Angeles Dodgers remain the favorites to win the World Series this season, but they are headed into the playoffs with a big question mark surrounding their roster.
After season-ending injuries to Gavin Stone, Tyler Glasnow, Dustin May and Emmet Sheehan, the team is scrambling to field a championship-caliber rotation. Clayton Kershaw might not recover from his own injury in time to contribute, Bobby Miller has been optioned to the minors amid command struggles and rookie Landon Knack was shaky in his latest start.
As the team looks for pitching reinforcement wherever they might find it, many have wondered if two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani could return to the mound in October after remaining limited to a designated-hitter role all season following his own elbow injury in 2023.
“The Dodgers have spent all summer saying Ohtani will not pitch this season while rehabbing from elbow surgery, but that rehab should soon end, just in time for his team to encounter an inning that requires three outs to win a series or a ring,” Bill Plaschke wrote for the Los Angeles Times. “By the time the postseason begins, Ohtani should be ready to pitch competitively.”
Team general manager Brandon Gomes and president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman have dismissed the possibility of Ohtani pitching at all this year. But in a recent roundup of “bold predictions for the 2024 MLB playoffs,” Bleacher Report’s Kerry Miller listed the expectation that he would end up taking the mound.
“This is Ohtani we’re talking about, after all,” Miller wrote. “He was already a unicorn, and as of now, anything seems possible.”
Miller noted that the conditions would have to be just right for the Dodgers to push Ohtani back onto the slab. The team would have to make it late into the postseason, in a situation where their other bullpen arms are depleted and, even then, it would only be for a limited relief appearance.
But even if the possibility of Ohtani’s return to the mound seems remote, it’s hard to imagine there is anything he cannot do on the baseball diamond. Recording the final outs in the World Series could be the perfect end to one of the greatest seasons in baseball history.
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