At 5:37 pm on Wednesday, Michael Bublé “I feel good” boomed from the Dodger Stadium speakers.
Shohei Ohtani walked up to the plate with a bat in his hands.
Of course, there was no one in the stands. No opposing pitcher on the mound. Dodgers, on this day of practice after returning from Milwaukee, they still had about 22 hours left before the National League Championship Series resumed against the Brewers. For any other player this would be business as usual.
Ohtani, however, is more than just a player.
And among the many things that make him unique, his habit of almost never practicing on the field is one of the small but notable ones.
That made his decision to do so Wednesday a telling event.
Ohtani has been in a slump over the past two weeks. Since the beginning of the NL Division series, he's just 2-for-25 with a whopping 12 strikeouts. He was choked out by a left-handed serve. He made poor decisions and failed to hit the ball.
Last week, manager Dave Roberts went so far as to say the Dodgers “can't win the World Series with this performance” from their $700 million slugger.
So Ohtani showed up to practice on Wednesday, the clearest sign of his urgent improvement.
“Another way to say it is: If I hit, we win,” Ohtani said in Japanese when asked about Roberts' World Series quote earlier Wednesday afternoon. “I think he thinks if I hit it, we'll win. I'd like to do my best to do that.”
In Roberts' opinion, Ohtani had already begun to improve from his dismal NLDS, when he struck out nine in 18 at-the-plate hits against the heavy left-hander of the Philadelphia Phillies, who, as president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman emphatically put it, had “the most impressive performance against a hitter I've ever seen.”
In Game 1 of the NLCS against the Brewers, Ohtani was 0-for-2 but walked three; twice intentionally, but another on a more disciplined five-pitch game to start the game against rookie left-hander Aaron Ashby.
He hit just one for five the next night and added three more strikeouts, giving him 15 points this postseason, second-most in the playoffs. But he had an RBI single to mark his first run since Game 2 of the NLDS. He followed that up with an interception for his first sack of the playoffs. And earlier in the game, he burned a lineout to right field at 185.2 mph, the hardest hit since he hit Cincinnati Reds pitcher Hunter Greene deep in the team's first postseason game.
“The first two games in Milwaukee, his at-bats were fantastic,” Roberts said Wednesday before heading to the field to watch Ohtani's impromptu BP session.
“That's what I was looking for. That's what I'm looking forward to,” he added, while noting the cautious approach the Brewers also took with the future four-time MVP. “You can only take what they give you. So I think he's in a good place right now.”
Shohei Ohtani puts the ball in play in the third inning of Game 4 of the NLDS.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Ohtani's overall numbers, of course, still suggest otherwise. His .147 postseason batting average is second worst on the team, ahead of only Andy Pages. His seven-game drought without hitting an extra base is longer than anything he endured during the regular season.
“The first thing I need to do is improve my batting skills,” Ohtani said in Japanese. “Hit strikes, not balls.”
Ohtani's slump Wednesday also raised questions about his role as a two-way player and whether his return to pitching this season (and this October for the first time in the playoffs) contributed to his sudden struggles at the plate.
After all, when Ohtani pitched this season, he hit .222 with four home runs and 21 strikeouts. In the early days after his walk, he batted .147 with two home runs and 10 strikeouts.
His current slump began with a four-strikeout failure in Game 1 of the NLDS, when he also pitched a six-inning, three-run start on the mound.
And within days, Roberts acknowledged some likely correlation between Ohtani's two roles.
“[His offense] “Wasn't good when it came in,” Roberts said after the NLDS. “We have to think things through and come up with the best game plan.”
Ohtani, on the other hand, stepped back somewhat from that narrative during Wednesday's practice, in which he also threw a bullpen session in preparation for his next start in Game 4 of the NLCS on Friday.
While doing both roles is “more physically demanding,” he admitted, he countered, “I don't know if there's a direct correlation.”
“Physically,” he added, “I don’t feel like there’s a connection.”
Instead, Ohtani set about fixing his swing Wednesday like any other normal hitter would. He took to the field for his rare training session. Of his 32 swings, he sent 14 over the fence, including one that bounced off the roof of the right field pavilion.
“There's certainly disappointment,” Roberts said of how he thinks Ohtani is handling his uncharacteristic underperformance.
But, he added, “It's expected. I don't mind. I like the advantage.”
“He's obviously a very, very talented player and we're counting on him,” Roberts continued. “He's just a great competitor. He's very prepared. And there's still a lot of baseball left.”
