Well, this might be the most insane piece of “advice” you’ll ever hear directed at a Major League Baseball team.
The Los Angeles Dodgers failed to reach the World Series for the third consecutive season, getting swept by the unrelenting Milwaukee Brewers superteam. For most Dodgers fans, it was disappointing, sure, but the success of the previous two years, the big postseason moments from superstar players, and the parades through Los Angeles dampened the blow relative to other seasons.
But local sports media have spent the past week searching for the explanation for LA’s “failure.” The actual reason the Dodgers lost, that the postseason in baseball is little more than a coin flip and small sample sizes flatten out any talent advantage, is boring and uninteresting. For example, in game four, the Brewers’ expected batting average was .237, while LA’s was .296. Milwaukee scored six runs, though the Dodgers scored just four – which is how we get to this week’s article from Bill Plaschke at the Los Angeles Times.
His postmortem of the Dodgers’ season places much of the blame on, uh, Shohei Ohtani.
There’s a kernel of truth to it; Ohtani was clearly limited by several injuries down the stretch, with a lengthy slump accompanying an increase in chase rate and swing and miss. There’s no way to tell how those injuries happened. Yes, Ohtani had returned to pitching full time in 2026, but LA’s famously careful with Ohtani on the mound, and there’s no indication that it was directly responsible for him getting hurt.
But the whole team struggled offensively in October, with a .195/.267/.323 batting line and a remarkable .116 batting average with runners in scoring position. Going 5-43 with runners in scoring position isn’t going to cut it, and it’s a far bigger problem than just one player.
The big debate though, that Plaschke references, is whether Ohtani should continue pitching, being a two-way player, in 2027 and beyond. Ohtani and the team have already said he intends to do both next year, but Plashcke believes he knows better.
“…He’s changing. His body is changing. His skills are changing. He’s 32, with 13 seasons of professional baseball burdening his lumbering 6-foot-4 frame, and part of his game is slowly disintegrating under the weight.”
“Lumbering” is an odd way to describe a player who stole 50 bases two seasons ago, but don’t worry, it gets worse.
“The problem is his pitching,” Plaschke continues, saying that it’s “distracting him” and “exhausting him” and that “enough is enough.”
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That’s debatable, sure, but again, there’s logic to it. Ohtani is such a valuable hitter that there’s a case to be made for him to focus exclusively on being a DH. But what he says next has well, no logic or reason behind it whatsoever.
“They need to pull him off the pitching mound permanently. And if he insists on continuing this detrimental charade, they need to seriously consider trading him.”
Alright, well now we’ve officially left the world of rationality and gone into some sort of bizarre performance art trolling act. Or something. Hopefully.
Trading Shohei Ohtani is somewhere beyond insane. Even if he hurt his arm and required surgery to miss nine months and permanently put pitching behind him, trading him would be insane. Even if he only pitches 50-70 innings a year, that’s immensely valuable combined with his hitting prowess. For context, top end relievers are making $20+ million a season to throw 60-70 innings. Ohtani’s offense is worth $50-60 million a year, and even in limited usage, his pitching is worth at least the additional $20 million if not much more. With the upside of even greater value.
Then there’s the fact that with Ohtani pitching in 2025, the Dodgers won the World Series. Including game three, when Ohtani hit two homers to help get the game to extra innings. Then there was game four of the 2025 NLCS, when he had arguably the single greatest performance in baseball history. Going six shutout innings with 10 strikeouts and hitting three home runs, including one that literally left Dodger Stadium.
But that’s the baseball side of it.
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Ohtani is such a transcendent star that he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Los Angeles in advertising, marketing, and promotions. His contract, even at a heavily deferred $70 million per season, is one of the biggest bargains in the sport. The extra revenue he brings in has allowed the Dodgers to go from being a top three or four spending team to being number one. The rush from the other 29 teams to acquire him would be quite literally hilarious, because trading Ohtani would be an act of financial suicide for LA and a massive windfall for a new team.
Plashcke is frequently not a serious person, but this is enough to warrant serious questioning of his ability to continue writing about baseball for a “legitimate” newspaper. The LA Times should ask him to focus on his one true love; left-wing politics. Clearly, his attempt to try to do both is hurting both himself, and the paper, and should lead to some very serious conversations between the two sides.
