When Shohei Ohtani takes the mound Monday night for the Los Angeles Dodgers, it will mark his first pitching appearance since August 23, 2023. In the time since, he’s joined a new team, undergone surgery, won a World Series, and become a father. Now, all eyes turn to what kind of pitcher he still is—and what tweaks, if any, the Dodgers have made to maximize his already elite repertoire.
As CBS Sports’ RJ Anderson notes, there are questions about what Ohtani’s arsenal will look like post-surgery. “It’s possible that his velocity isn’t quite the same, or that the Dodgers have asked him to tinker with this or that pitch shape to further optimize his game,” Anderson writes. “(Now there’s a scary thought.)”
Shohei Ohtani’s Return to the Mound: What to Expect from His Arsenal After 664 Days
Before his hiatus, Ohtani regularly featured six distinct pitches: a four-seam fastball, sweeper, cutter, sinker, splitter, and curveball. His fastball averaged 96.8 mph and showed natural cut, thanks to a supinator motor preference—a biomechanical trait that gives his pitches unique movement.
Among his tools, the sweeper was his favorite to open counts and to put hitters away. But it was his curveball that missed the most bats, and his splitter that generated the weakest contact. In short: Ohtani didn’t just overpower hitters, he outsmarted them.
How much of that arsenal remains intact—or evolves—will be revealed in real time. But even a slightly modified version of Ohtani could be enough to give the injury-riddled Dodgers rotation a jolt of electricity.
After nearly two years, the baseball world finally gets to see Ohtani the pitcher again. Whether he’s the same or somehow better, it’s must-watch baseball.