Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani gamble has blown up in their faces at the worst possible time

The Dodgers are on the doorstep of elimination, and they deserve to be.

The Brewers are better.

They hit better, they pitch better, and they field better.

Beating these Brewers would have required a superhuman performance on the part of the Dodgers, and the possibility of them producing such a miracle vanished months ago.

The Dodgers didn’t lose the chance to win their third consecutive World Series in this National League Championship Series, which they now trail by a three-games-to-none margin after a 6-2 defeat in Game 3 on Wednesday night.

The chance was lost when they lost Shohei Ohtani.

The Dodgers will be eliminated some time over the next several days, perhaps as early as Thursday. Knowing what is known now, it’s evident the Dodgers couldn’t have avoided this crash-and-burn ending without a version of Ohtani they rarely had this season.

The Ohtani who became the first player to homer 50 times and steal 50 bases in the same season in 2024.

The Ohtani who launched a career-high 55 home runs last season.

The Ohtani who hit three home runs to eliminate the Brewers last year at this stage of the postseason.

And even that might not have been enough.

But the Dodgers’ mismanagement of Ohtani ruled out that series-altering player from ever showing up in October. Once it was clear that he couldn’t knock the ball over the fence, the Dodgers lost the offensive firepower they would have needed to win a third consecutive World Series.

The problem wasn’t the Dodgers’ support of Ohtani’s early-season efforts to become a full-time two-way player again.

The Dodgers knew what they were in for when they signed him. They knew playing both ways was central to his identity as a baseball player.

Nor was it unpardonable for them to initially allow him to attempt to pitch through the discomfort in his left knee.

As the team’s decision makers pointed out, no team had ever managed a two-way player who was turning 32 in the middle of the season. Testing the waters was reasonable.

Somewhere around the All-Star break, however, it started becoming obvious the direction in which Ohtani was trending. In addition to forcing him to abandon pitching, his problems with his right arm and left knee were noticeably affecting him in the batter’s box.

The Dodgers didn’t step in.

Whether it was because they were afraid to tell Ohtani something he might not want to hear or because they actually believed he wouldn’t cross the point of no return, the Dodgers let Ohtani continue doing what he wanted to do, and that was to play.

By September, the situation was unsalvageable. 

Not enough time remained on the calendar for Ohtani to physically recover before the playoffs. Ohtani at first tried to figure out how to be productive in a physically-compromised state. When that didn’t work, he went on the 15-day injured list.

Predictably, Ohtani hasn’t looked like himself the entire postseason.

To his credit, he has reached base in six of the seven games he’s played in these playoffs, but the Dodgers didn’t need a table-setter to reach the World Series. They needed a home-run hitter –– and that player is in a medical ward in an alternate universe.

With a broken-down version of Ohtani in the sixth spot of their lineup on Wednesday night, the Dodgers batted Teoscar Hernandez third, Kyle Tucker fourth and Andy Pages fifth.

Does that look like the heart of the order of a $400-plus-million team?

Brewers starter Robert Gasser lasted only four innings in his Division Series against the San Diego Padres, but the Dodgers made him look like Sandy Koufax on Wednesday.

The Dodgers failed to score a single run against Gasser in five innings.

The absence of offense, combined with a lack of trust in the team’s combustible bullpen, resulted in Dodgers starter Blake Snell being pushed beyond his limits.

Snell’s first pitch of Game 3 was a down-the-middle fastball to Jackson Chourio that was launched over the right-field wall for a home run, but the two-time Cy Young Award winner quickly recovered to strike out the next three batters.

Snell issued a one-out walk to Garrett Mitchell in the second inning and followed that up by giving up a single to Cooper Pratt, but didn’t allow either of them to score.

From there, Snell was on a roll, as his next four innings were perfect.

Disaster struck in the seventh inning when Snell served up back-to-back home runs to Jake Bauers and Andrew Mitchell that moved the Brewers in front, 4-2.

The deficit was only two runs, but with how the Dodgers were hitting, it might as well have been 200.

In the wake of an international debate about whether he should be benched, Ohtani reached base three times, taking a pitch on his rear end, drawing a walk and stroking a single to center field.

Considering his physical state, Ohtani was productive.

But the Dodgers needed more from him. They needed a performance he wasn’t capable of producing on this night. They could only blame decisions they made months earlier for that.