OHTANI FUTURE STARTS UP IN THE AIR
A sore arm will keep Angels star off mound. It’s unclear if he will pitch again this season.
The Angels got one pitcher back Thursday, as Alex Cobb returned from injury to throw five scoreless innings in the team’s 9-3 win over the Chicago White Sox.
But they might have suffered another blow on the mound.
Shohei Ohtani will not pitch Friday as originally expected after he experienced arm soreness this week, manager Joe Maddon said, and there’s no guarantee the two-way star will take the mound again before the season ends.
Ohtani had been penciled in to start Friday’s series opener against the Oakland Athletics but felt soreness after playing catch Wednesday, according to Maddon.
It’s unclear what will come next for Ohtani. Maddon said the team isn’t shutting him down and that they’re hopeful he could just be battling normal late-season fatigue. They’re planning to have him play catch again in the next few days and see how he feels.
As of Thursday morning, there was no plan to have him see a doctor.
“If he feels great, adamantly, I see nothing wrong with [him pitching again],” Maddon said. “But if there’s any kind of lingering sore
ness, you may not see him pitch. I just don’t know that answer yet.”
Maddon said he did ask Ohtani about potentially not playing the rest of the season, either as a pitcher or a hitter, where he was slumping with a .147 batting average over his last 20 games before recording two infield singles in Thursday’s win as the designated hitter.
However, “he felt he’s still good and he still wants to get after it,” Maddon said. “But I did broach the subject with him.”
Though Ohtani has missed pitching starts this year because of blisters on his fingers and soreness around his hand and wrist area after being struck by balls, this is the first time the team said he had any sort of arm issue.
In 2018, Ohtani underwent Tommy John surgery after making 10 pitching starts in his first MLB season. He didn’t pitch in 2019 — a season that ended early for him at the plate because of a knee surgery — then managed just two outings in a short-lived return to the mound in 2020 before being sidelined as a pitcher because of a right forearm injury.
This year, however, Ohtani became the best pitcher in the Angels rotation, dominating with a fastball that occasionally reached 100 mph, an assortment of off-speed and breaking pitches, and consistent command that continued to improve over the course of the year.
In 21 starts, he has a 3.36 ERA, 136 strikeouts and a 9-2 record.
Maddon said that getting to 10 wins is probably a personal goal for Ohtani but that “we can’t permit that to be the driving factor.”
“We’re just gonna let it play itself out right now,” Maddon added. “He’ll continue to do his thing, playing catch or whatever. And then we’ll determine if he feels good enough to [make a pitching start] again. I think he can. But we’ve been caught in these circumstances a lot this year, so just have to wait and see.”
Cobb offered a reprieve against the White Sox, surprising even himself in his first start since July 23 after battling a wrist injury.
In his five scoreless innings, he gave up only two hits (both singles) and two walks while striking out five.
“I didn’t think I was going to work that deep into the game and I definitely thought I’d probably be working a little bit harder,” Cobb said. “But the overall stuff I was really happy with.”
It helped the Angels, who scored all nine of their runs in the first five innings, win a rubber-match game against the first-place White Sox, lifting the team to 72-74 on the season and giving it a 4-4 mark to finish its eight-game trip.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Maddon said. “I thought we played hard … the whole road trip.”