Shohei Ohtani looks oddly human but still delivers 6 quality innings in Dodgers' loss to Blue Jays

Jake MintzThu, April 9, 2026 at 2:47 AM UTC

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TORONTO — By his own admission, Shohei Ohtani was feeling tired before he even threw a pitch.

That is perhaps the reason the two-way supernova was not at his best Wednesday. Making his second pitching start of this young baseball season, the Dodgers hurler did not have his typical crispness. The command was scattershot, the mechanics were out of sorts. Ohtani struck out only two hitters, his lowest total ever in a start that lasted more than four innings. Particularly in the early going, he had little feel for his splitter or curveball, two offerings he typically leans on to get left-handed hitters out.

But while the process was far from dominant, the end product was more than sufficient.

Ohtani surrendered just one run and four hits across six innings. He grew more comfortable as the game wore on. His fastball touched 100.1 mph and averaged 98.3, the latter an encouraging 1.5 mph jump from his debut outing last week. He took advantage of a scuffling Blue Jays lineup to limit damage and avoid the big inning.

Oh, and he reached base twice as a hitter.

When Ohtani left the mound after six with the Dodgers up 2-1, everything was hunky dory. That was the case until a Los Angeles bullpen misstep tipped the scales, giving Toronto a 4-3 victory and ruining the Dodgers’ hopes of a 6-0 run away from home.

“When you win the first five, you want to get greedy and win the last one,” manager Dave Roberts said afterward. “But yeah, it’s still a really good road trip.”

After the game, Ohtani was honest about his relatively subpar showing, telling reporters through interpreter Will Ireton that he “didn’t really feel great going into the game.” Pressed as to whether that meant he was simply tired or physically and mechanically discombobulated, Ohtani was characteristically vague.

“I think it’s a little bit of both, for sure,” he said.

He also implied that the timing of this particular start played a role in that fatigue. Los Angeles headed home Wednesday night after a weeklong East Coast swing. Four of L.A.’s six games on this trip, including all three over the weekend in Washington, were afternoon affairs. For a famously sleep-needy machine such as Ohtani, the combination of cross-country jet-lag and early morning alarms could be liable to fritz the system.

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“It was a grind. You could see it,” Roberts admitted postgame. “He just didn’t feel synced up with his delivery. You can see by the misses, he was fighting himself, you know, the entire outing. But obviously, the compete comes into play, the stuff comes into play, and you know, he found a way to get through six innings.”

Ohtani led off the game, in the batter’s box, with a walk against Toronto starter Dylan Cease. Two batters later, with Ohtani on second base, Cease tried to pick off his Dodgers counterpart. Ohtani slid cleanly back into the bag, but his uniform wasn’t so spick and span. When he jogged to the mound a few minutes later, he did so with a large mud stain stretching from his chest down to his knees on one side.

That image — Ohtani as the dirtied pitcher — perfectly encapsulated the outrageousness of it all, of what he is trying to do and is doing. Despite being at less than full strength on Wednesday, he was able to deliver an effective performance.

Yet the outing was also a humbling reminder that, even for this outlier of outliers, there are such things as physical limitations.

Ohtani’s two-way exploits come with a significant amount of stress and strain. We saw that reality laid bare the last time he climbed the hill at Rogers Centre, in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series. Working on short rest that night, Ohtani was rickety, vulnerable. A subpar slider to Bo Bichette in the third ended up in the seats and gave Toronto a 3-0 lead. Ultimately, the Dodgers clawed back and made history, but Ohtani’s evening on the bump was one to forget.

There’d been other occasional signs of fatigue from the four-time MVP, but that was the most striking example of exhaustion negatively impacting his performance. Some of that, obviously, was related to his willingness to throw on short rest, but Ohtani’s offensive responsibilities absolutely played a role. Remember, a week prior, he’d gone 4-for-4 with two homers and five walks in Game 3 before pitching the next day. By the end of the Fall Classic, he was a man on empty, running on less than fumes.

But now, just two starts into his first full two-way season since 2023, Ohtani is already offering glimpses of what being stretched too thin might look like for him. Practically, nothing is dire or even approaching it. To be clear, there are no alarm bells ringing. The Dodgers will happily take Wednesday’s pitching output. And while there’s work to be done, everybody expects Ohtani to do it and to figure things out. Besides, it is, on a macro level, preposterously unwise to doubt a sporting force so transcendent.

However, there will come a time when Ohtani’s workload becomes too much. Even for him.

Whether that moment arrives this year or the next or further down the line will be the final mystery of Ohtani’s legendary career. The Dodgers will remain hyper-aware, hyper-vigilant of any concerning clues that arise in order to protect the game’s most valuable character. But on Wednesday, while standing in the visitor’s batting cage conducting his postgame interview in the bowels of Rogers Centre, Ohtani, with his throwing arm wrapped over an oversized bulge of ice, looked strikingly human.

He’ll lead off and DH on Friday night.

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Source: “AOL Sports”