Shohei Ohtani starts on mound, doesn’t hit as Dodgers beat Mets

LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani had gone 16 innings without allowing a run this season when MJ Melendez came to bat in Wednesday’s top of the fifth and hit the ground-rule double that finally got the New York Mets on the board.

Clearly, it angered Ohtani, because what followed were four fastballs that exceeded 100 mph, getting him out of the only trouble he faced all night and punctuating another stellar outing for the aspiring Cy Young candidate.

“I can’t go full throttle the whole time,” Ohtani, speaking through an interpreter, said after the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ sweep-clinching 8-2 victory over the Mets. “But considering where the game was at that point, I felt like I just really had to go full throttle.”

Given the 94 mph sinker he took near the right shoulder three days earlier and the four-game series that will follow at mile-high altitude in Denver shortly thereafter, the Dodgers kept Ohtani out of the lineup for Wednesday’s series finale. It marked the first time he pitched but did not hit since May 28, 2021, the year before Major League Baseball instituted what’s known as “The Ohtani Rule,” which allows pitchers to spend entire games in the lineup if they also start at designated hitter.

Instead, Dalton Rushing started at DH and hit a grand slam, putting the game out of reach in the eighth inning. And Ohtani provided another dominant start, allowing just the one run while striking out 10 batters in six innings.

Three starts in, his ERA is just 0.50.

“It was actually really good to watch him just focus on one thing,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I thought that just channeling all that energy into pitching was helpful. The last couple outings, I felt he was fighting himself a little bit at times. But tonight, he was really good.”

Ohtani threw his four-seam fastball 53.7% of the time, by far his most this season. Through his first two starts, only one of his eight strikeouts came on the fastball. On Wednesday, though, four of the first five did. All told, Ohtani generated 22 swings and misses against a scuffling Mets offense, his most in a game since 2023. Thirteen of them came off the fastball, a career high, according to ESPN Research.

His four fastest came in the fifth, an inning that began with a couple of walks that were followed by Melendez’s RBI double, which snapped Ohtani’s 32⅔-inning regular-season scoreless streak dating to last year.

With two on and one out, Tommy Pham saw an 0-1 fastball at 100.2 mph and another at 100.3 mph to strike out. Francisco Lindor then saw a first-pitch fastball at 100.1 mph and a second at 100.4 mph, lining out to end the threat. In the sixth, Ohtani struck out the side on a 97.4 mph fastball, a 71.5 mph curveball and an 88.1 mph splitter, boasting the variance of his arsenal.

“I mean, it’s Shohei — I don’t have too much more to say on top of that,” Rushing said. “I think it was cool to see him basically just put all of his attention into what he’s doing on the mound. Not that he wasn’t already one of the better pitchers in the big leagues now, but I think he’s arguably one of the best now, when you give him that opportunity to just solely worry about pitching. Everyone knows what he can do with the bat, everyone knows what he can do with the baseball. But being able to separate the two sometimes, it’s honestly better.”