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Shohei Ohtani is still dealing with the left knee inflammation that pulled him out of a game early last week, per Dodger Blue staff. While he’s only missed one game since the initial issue surfaced, the Dodgers have been carefully managing his workload — most notably in the series finale against Tampa Bay, where he was limited to pitching only and did not hit. That marked the fifth time in 12 pitching starts this season that Ohtani has been held out of the batting lineup on days he takes the mound.

Ohtani’s knee inflammation first became a visible concern when he was removed from a game last week, raising immediate questions about whether the two-way workload was catching up to him. The fact that he’s continued to pitch through it — and has only sat out one game — suggests this isn’t a structural problem, but it’s clearly not gone either. The Dodgers are threading a needle here: keeping their most important player on the field while not letting a manageable issue snowball into something that costs them weeks or months down the line. Five out of twelve starts where he’s been pitch-only tells you the club is being deliberate about when they ask him to do both jobs in the same game.

For Ohtani, this is familiar territory in the broadest sense. His entire career has been defined by the question of how much workload one body can absorb. After the elbow reconstruction that kept him off the mound for the entire 2024 season — during which he still posted a 54-homer, 130-RBI campaign as a full-time DH — Ohtani returned to two-way duties in 2025 and has carried that into 2026. He’s been arguably the best player in baseball during his time in Los Angeles, but the physical demands of pitching and hitting at an elite level remain unprecedented. Every tweak and every day off gets scrutinized, and this knee situation is no exception.

The broader concern here isn’t one game or one series — it’s the pattern. If the Dodgers are already limiting his two-way appearances to roughly 60% of his pitching starts, that has real implications for how they construct lineups and manage the DH spot over the course of the season. When Ohtani pitches but doesn’t hit, someone else slots into that DH role, and while the Dodgers have roster depth, there’s a significant offensive dropoff from losing Ohtani’s bat on any given night. The club clearly believes this is the smart play right now — keep him pitching, protect the knee, and get his bat back in there on non-pitching days. I think they’re handling it correctly, but this is something we need to keep watching. If the inflammation doesn’t resolve and the pitch-only days keep stacking up, the calculus could change heading into the second half. For now, Ohtani is still out there, still competing, and the Dodgers are managing the situation rather than reacting to it — which is exactly what you want to see.

Source(s): Staff (Dodger Blue) | First reported: June 19, 2026 6:27 PM UTC

God Bless and Go Dodgers