DALLAS — The dream of having Shohei Ohtani make his return to the mound in Japan is not going to happen.
Although it was widely assumed after Ohtani had left shoulder surgery that the rehab would prevent him from being ready to pitch for the Dodgers’ season-opening series March 18-19 in Tokyo, Manager Dave Roberts confirmed it in the strongest words to date on Monday.
“Very unlikely,” Roberts said during his press conference on the first day of MLB’s winter meetings. “I just don’t see us starting the clock in March to then think that we would keep that continuously going through October.”
Ohtani is expected to be ready to hit for that series against the Chicago Cubs.
Since Ohtani came to the major leagues in 2018, the only time he’s played in Japan was during the World Baseball Classic in the spring of 2023. Major League Baseball certainly scheduled the Dodgers for this series – just a year after they opened in South Korea – largely as a way to capitalize on Ohtani’s popularity.
Once Ohtani had surgery to repair his left shoulder in early November, it became apparent that it would be unlikely for him to be ready to pitch by mid-March.
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Speaking more generally about the pitching plan for Ohtani in 2025, Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said Monday there’s no specific blueprint yet for how they’d like to manage his workload.
“Obviously we don’t want him to throw 225 innings,” Gomes said. “We’ve just got to kind of see where this throwing program goes, how it continues to feel. We’ll have those conversations, like we do with most of our guys. What we feel like is most important is that he is ready to pitch at his highest level when the games matter the most. And obviously early season games are very important, but we feel like if we can get him to a position where he is peaking towards the end of the season, that is the ideal scenario.
“But there are guys that throw a lot of innings early on. So much of it is like just seeing how he goes. And he’s obviously one of one right now, so we’ll see how he feels and get the feedback. And we’re layering on additional, higher workload from the hitting side too. So we just need to figure out how to balance that all properly.”