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Brewers manager Pat Murphy didn’t take the Shohei Ohtani-speculation bait.
But, when asked about Ohtani’s uncertain status coming out of Game 2 of the National League Championship Series this week, outfielder Garrett Mitchell did.
“I’d be shocked,” Mitchell said on Tuesday, when asked about the possibility of Ohtani not being in the Dodgers’ lineup for a critical Game 3 on Wednesday. “He’s the greatest player in the game, arguably going down as the best player ever. This game is very hard. One day you can be on top of the world, and on the next you are hitting the lowest of lows … But I know that whether he’s feeling good or he’s not feeling good, he’s always going to be someone that you have to game-plan for.
“You never know,” Mitchell added. “It takes one swing to come back.”
As it turned out, Ohtani was granted the chance for a big swing on Wednesday.
Despite his woeful performance so far this postseason, and his ongoing struggles with right arm and left knee injuries, Ohtani was kept in the Dodgers’ lineup for Game 3 of the NLCS.
He was, as manager Dave Roberts relayed while announcing the decision on Tuesday, “convicted” and “adamant” in his ability to find something at the plate, and look more like the four-time MVP that has spearheaded the Dodgers’ offense during their run to back-to-back World Series titles the last two years.
“‘I want to be in there. I know I can help the team. I’m close,’” Ohtani told Roberts and top front-office executives Andrew Friedman and Brandon Gomes during a meeting on Tuesday, as Roberts later recounted.
“That,” Roberts added, “is all I need to hear.”
Ohtani’s chances of following through on such optimism, of course, still seemed dubious.
He entered Wednesday batting just 3-for-20 with no extra-base hits or RBIs this postseason. He hadn’t launched a home run since Aug. 18, mired in the longest single-season long-ball drought of his MLB career. He was coming off a particularly poor performance in Game 2, going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and several awkward swings in a 7-4 loss that put the Dodgers in a 2-0 series hole.
Still, the Brewers remained wary of the 32-year-old’s capabilities.
They couldn’t help but remember last year’s NLCS, when Ohtani entered Game 4 in a 3-for-29 slump — then delivered perhaps the greatest individual performance in baseball history, hitting three home runs and striking out 10 batters to complete a pennant-clinching sweep.
“There’s proof of that even last year,” Mitchell noted. “Probably didn’t have the greatest series to start, but that Game 4, it just takes one day.”
“You can’t forget that,” Murphy added. “Do you know how tough it is to execute what he did?”
This version of Ohtani, of course, looks nothing like last year’s.
He isn’t pitching. He isn’t slugging. Outside of a few slap singles and a couple walks, he has hardly even posed a threat to reach base.
Has that changed the way the Brewers have attacked him in this NLCS rematch, Murphy was asked:
“You still have to go at him,” he said, coyly. “You have to go at everybody.”
As for whether Murphy would have been surprised to see Ohtani benched for Game 3?
“That’s out of my hands,” he said. “But surprise? Nothing in this game surprises me, to tell you the truth. Right when you think you know something, be careful; you might not.”
With their season hanging in the balance, the Dodgers are hoping that will prove true with their slumping superstar slugger.