How well Shohei Ohtani will hold up in his return to a full-time two-way role this year remains somewhat in question, amid his recent and perplexing slump at the plate.
Whether or not he can be a viable Cy Young candidate as a pitcher, however, is no longer in doubt.
Ohtani already had the best early-season stats of any big-league starter before Wednesday night. Then, he went out and had his best performance of the young campaign, throwing seven scoreless innings with eight strikeouts in the Dodgers’ win over the Giants.
With that, the four-time MVP is now doing something Chavez Ravine hasn’t seen since the days of Fernandomania in 1981.
His 0.82 ERA is the best by a Dodgers pitcher to this point of a year since Fernando Valenzuela’s historic ‘81 season (when Valenzuela had an incomprehensible 0.29 ERA in seven consecutive season-opening complete games).
Ohtani is also just the seventh pitcher in MLB history (since earned runs became an official stat in 1912) to have a sub-0.85 ERA and at least 50 strikeouts in his first seven starts, according to MLB researcher Sarah Langs.
Sub-0.85 ERA & 50+ strikeouts in first seven outings of season, since ER official in AL+NL (1913):2026 Shohei Ohtani2021 Jacob deGrom2009 Johan Santana 2009 Zack Greinke1981 Fernando Valenzuela 1914 Dutch Leonard https://t.co/E1WmpJwqHn
All of it has cemented Ohtani’s place as a legitimate Cy Young frontrunner –– giving him an early leg up on even the reigning National League award winner, Paul Skenes (who is 6-2 with a 1.98 ERA, albeit with six more strikeouts and innings pitched than Ohtani).
It is validating a goal that, given the workload challenges Ohtani was facing in his return to two-way duties this year, felt more fantastical when the season began.
“I’ve said for a long time, he’s a different person when he’s pitching,” manager Dave Roberts said Wednesday night. “He wants to win the Cy Young … So when he’s pitching, I just sort of let him go. He’s in a zone.”
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That was certainly the case Wednesday, when Ohtani was removed from the Dodgers’ batting for his third-straight pitching start and the fourth time in his last five outings on the mound overall.
Had he been in a two-way role, Roberts said he likely would’ve pulled the plug on Ohtani’s start at the end of the sixth inning, when his pitch count was already up to 90.
But, because Ohtani had only the one task to focus on, Roberts felt comfortable sending him back out for the seventh. And thanks to the help of a Willy Adames base-running gaffe that led to an inning-ending double-play, it enabled him to complete a scoreless seven-inning outing for the first time since he returned from his second-career Tommy John surgery last year.
His 105 pitches were also the most he has thrown in that span.
“He wants to be the best pitcher in baseball, and right now, he’s doing it,” Roberts said. “You can tell he’s hyper-focused on the preparation part of it, and then obviously the days that he starts, the execution.”
Ohtani would still like to be executing better as a hitter, of course. Entering another planned off day Thursday, he was batting just .240 this season with seven home runs (including only two in his last 28 games) and a .796 OPS (which is well above league average, but more than 200 points lower than what he has posted each of the last three years).
“Nothing would be better than to be in great form in both (roles),” Ohtani said in Japanese.
But, he added, “even when the hitting was bad, I went to the mound every time with feelings of wanting to contribute.”
When Roberts was asked if he sensed a heightened responsibility from Ohtani to pitch well amid his recent struggles offensively, the manager was even more definitive.
“Yeah, I do,” Roberts said. “He’s trying to put up numbers offensively, and when he’s not right, it’s hard as a hitter, when you’re scuffling and you’re not feeling well. But as a pitcher, you have the control of the game.”
Indeed, Ohtani has controlled each game he has pitched with an arsenal that almost seems improved since his second Tommy John.
It starts with his upper-90s mph fastball, which opponents are batting just .162 against this season. From there, he can put hitters away with his devastating sweeper, which has yielded just a .108 average and generated a 42% whiff rate; his knee-buckling curveball, which has yet to be turned into a hit this year while getting whiffs 41% of the time; or any of the other weapons in his seven-pitch repertoire.
In addition to his league-leading ERA, Ohtani is also top-three in the NL in WHIP (0.82), overall batting average against (.161) and wins-above-replacement (1.6 as a pitcher, according to Fangraphs).
“He’s not in build-up mode (anymore),” Roberts said, contrasting Ohtani’s pitching dominance now to his slow ramp-up returning from surgery last year. “I think that he has confidence in all of his pitches, and he feels that he can get hitters out in different ways. Where I think last year, he was still trying to get his footing on getting back to pitching on some type of routine schedule.”
It’s still unclear exactly how Ohtnai’s schedule will evolve the rest of this year.
While the Dodgers have been proactive about giving him more days to just focus on pitching, they also want his bat in the lineup as much as possible –– confident that he will eventually emerge from a slump that already showed signs of ending when he hit an opposite-field home run Tuesday night.
But for now, his pitching has provided a constant and tantalizing source of consistent production.
So much so, the once far-fetched idea of him winning the Cy Young not only feels real, but is suddenly becoming more of an expectation with each new pitching gem.
“It seems like whenever he’s on the mound, you expect a no-hitter, and then when he’s hitting, you expect two homers,” Roberts quipped. “That’s kind of his lot in life. It’s what he did to deserve that.”
