Has Shohei Ohtani peaked? Putting his quiet start at the plate into perspective

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Perhaps it’s not a question worth pondering. After all, much of the joy watching Shohei Ohtani play baseball is wondering what he might do next, and if a ceiling even exists for the greatest player in the game’s history.

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Yet with every passing game accompanied by quiet at-bats, with his hard-hit ball rate slipping below 50%, and with his every-six-days “hobby” of pitching absorbing more of his energy, it’s fair to at least wonder.

Has Shohei Ohtani plateaued?

Yeah, it seems like sacrilege. No player in the history of the game has ever thrown fastballs 100 mph and hit them 400 feet with regularity. Has produced 50 homers and 50 steals in a season. Nor put together arguably the greatest game in baseball history to clinch his team’s place in the World Series.

Pondering his peak wastes precious headspace contextualizing whatever facet of the game he’s currently dominating (Right now, it’s locking down opposing hitters). And besides, Ohtani doesn’t ebb and flow so much as he shape-shifts.

Watch Ohtani long enough and you realize he gives us what he can at a given time. Can’t pitch in 2024 due to Tommy John surgery recuperation?

Fine, Ohtani simply stole 59 bases – more than twice his previous career best – and hit 54 home runs to produce the first 50-50 season in major league history, capped by his first World Series title.

Fully stretched out as a pitcher, and possessing the freshest arm after the Dodgers played all the way into November to claim a second consecutive championship?

OK, then, Ohtani will simply not hit on days he pitches, pour more into his mound work and put up a major league-leading 0.97 ERA in his first seven starts this season.

It’s amazing stuff. Yet as Ohtani’s 32nd birthday approaches in July, it’s also fair to wonder if we may have seen his best work as a hitter and true two-way player.

Let’s examine:

Ohtani the hitter: Underlying changes?

If Ohtani’s career were an art gallery, aficionados would stop in their tracks at his 2023 and 2024 offensive seasons. Which one was finer?

Either way, one of those can certainly be identified as Ohtani’s hitting apex. In 2023, Ohtani set career highs in on-base percentage, slugging and OPS (.412, .654, 1.056) and weighted runs created plus (185), all while pitching.

A year later, while recovering from elbow surgery, he established career highs with 54 homers, 130 RBI, 411 total bases and 187 adjusted OPS, while equaling his 185 wRC+ (and stealing 59 bases).

Last year? Well, this is where Ohtani’s production looks an awful lot like Apple stock in the same timeframe – it may fluctuate a bit, but it never dips too far.

Ohtani underwent offseason surgery on his left shoulder following a World Series injury suffered on a steal attempt. That didn’t slow him: Ohtani hit one more home run than 2024 finish with a career-best 55, once again led the majors in total bases (380) and his OPS stayed in the four-figure range (1.014). With pitching gradually entering the mix, his stolen bases dropped to 20.

And that brings us to the first quarter of this year.

Ohtani’s .442 slugging percentage would be his lowest in his eight full seasons, and his six home runs put him on pace for his first sub-30 full season since 2019. He snapped an 0-for-18 skid - second-longest of his career - with a double Wednesday, May 6 against the Houston Astros.

Certainly, it’s early. Yet Ohtani’s underlying metrics show a gradual slippage since his ’23-’24 apex.

Both his average exit velocity (95.8 mph) and hard-hit percentage (60.1%) peaked in 2024; in 2026, they’re at 93.6 and 48.4. His wRC+ and adjusted OPS have taken more dramatic tumbles, to 125 and 131 respectively – once again, his lowest full-season totals since 2019.

All the while, his bat speed has been ticking downward, from 77.4 mph in 2023 to 74.8 this season, dropping him to the 83rd percentile.

It’s perhaps little wonder, then, that the Dodgers have been sitting him on days he pitches. But that’s where we get to the good news portion of the program.

Ohtani the pitcher: More efficient, more effective

We’re closing in on the three-year anniversary of Ohtani’s finest hour on the mound, and perhaps as a two-way player: His one-hitter against Detroit on July 27, 2023. The Angels improved to 53-49 that day, added at the trade deadline. Life was good in Orange County.

Less than a month later, Ohtani’s elbow would give. The Angels faded badly. Ohtani became a Dodger.

And the gradual build-back to pitching is paying its biggest dividends right now.

So this Ohtani won’t blow you away like his former self, the guy who led the AL with 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings in 2022. This Ohtani is punching guys out at a 10.2/nine clip – but leading the majors in ERA (0.97) and WHIP (0.81).

This Ohtani is throwing his four-seam fastball harder (98 mph) and with more frequency (a career-high 44.5%). Consequently, he’s a bit less reliant on a sweeper that he probably fell a little too in love with just before his second elbow reconstruction in 2023.

His sweeper usage peaked at 37.4% in 2022. He now throws it a quarter of the time and it’s perhaps more devastating, as Jose Altuve recently found out.

Ohtani worked seven innings in that game, his longest outing since that 2023 one-hitter, and needed just 89 pitches to do so. Perhaps Ohtani won’t cross the 200-strikeout threshold again, as he did in 2022.

Yet he might be an even more effective pitcher, anyway, fulfilling his dreams of adding a Cy Young Award to his four MVPs.

Ohtani the two-way threat: Priorities, priorities

You’ve heard on more than one occasion that Ohtani is putting up “video game numbers” on the field, and that’s not a bad way to look at his output.

Hitting and pitching take their toll, and Ohtani seems to have mastered the art of keeping his energy bar right where he needs it.

Nobody recommends undergoing a pair of reconstructive elbow surgeries, but rehabbing both injuries allowed him to fully concentrate on pitching. He reached the apex of two-way greatness in 2022 and ’23, an almost robotic dispersal of his skills even as the distribution flipped:

2022: 3.4 batting WAR, 6.3 pitching WAR, 9.7 total.

2023: 6.1 batting WAR, 3.8 pitching WAR, 9.9 total.

Freed from pitching in 2024, he went 50-50 and still racked up 9.0 WAR – and the first of two World Series titles. The next year saw the Dodgers wisely slow play his pitching ramp-up, totaling 7.7 WAR and another title.

The postseason can’t be discounted: Ohtani beat both the Phillies and Brewers in the playoffs, holding Milwaukee to two hits and 10 strikeouts in a pennant-clinching win. A good use of his time and energy, for certain.

This year? Well, it’s impossible to say whether there’s a correlation between Ohtani’s pinpoint pitching (and the energy expended to get to that level) and his suboptimal, for him, offensive production. Ah, well: Ohtani’s merely on track for roughly 8.0 WAR.

Future Ohtani

Even if he doesn’t approach 50 home runs this season, Ohtani’s pitching excellence maintains the wondrous illusion that he can simply do anything his heart desires on a baseball field.

What form will that take as the Dodgers roster evolves, and Ohtani heads into his mid-30s?

This is very much a marathon: Ohtani is under contract through 2033, with only Yoshinobu Yamamoto guaranteed to be around longer. Naturally, the biggest X factor will continue to be arm health.

Could modern medicine save Ohtani’s elbow from a third disruption? Can his upper body withstand all the torque his upper body absorbs both hitting and pitching?

So long as it does, a frontline starter will always be a rarity, and a relative bargain when the Dodgers get two players for the price of one.

As for hitting? Well, it’s not out of the question that Ohtani has yet to tap into some of his Dad Strength, if you will. Age may rob him of certain athletic attributes. Hitting tape-measure shots probably won’t be one of them.

The Ohtani-Babe Ruth comp will always be a little inapt, given the disparate eras. But The Babe was a home run champ at 36. It’s easy to see Ohtani replicating that.

And even if the very, very best of Ohtani is behind him, there’s still an awful lot to look forward to – and no shortage of surprises he may provide us year after year.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Shohei Ohtani stats for two-way star lagging early in 2026 for Dodgers

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