NEWSLETTER
Shohei Ohtani’s free agency was already going to be replete with intrigue and mystery long before a tear in his UCL opened things up for even more drama. Having already been through one Tommy John surgery, there are reasonable questions about what a second surgery would do to Ohtani’s value as a pitcher, and, in turn, his value as the one true unicorn of professional baseball.
We don’t have answers to those questions yet, and won’t for a while. We don’t even know what the treatment plan is for Ohtani’s elbow, even as he continues to bat for the Angels as a DH in a dead season.
But we do now have a LITTLE bit more information, as Ohtani’s agent, Nez Balelo, addressed the media for the first time since the news of the elbow injury broke.
“There’s not a question in his mind that he’s going to come back and he’s going to continue to do both (pitching and hitting),” Balelo said, per ESPN. “Shohei’s going to be fine. Is he going to pitch the rest of the year? No. We already know that. Is he going to get into next year? We don’t know yet. So just bear with me on that. But I do know this – no matter what timetable we’re dealing with and when we get this done, Shohei’s going to be in somebody’s lineup next year, DHing when the bell rings. We know that. We’re not going to push that. He’s going to be good to go.”
A bold proclamation from Balelo, given that a major elbow surgery would presumably cost Ohtani at least SOME time as a hitter next year.
Ah, but that might be the most interesting thing Balelo said.
He described this UCL tear as in a “completely different” location than the previous tear, where the repair is still holding strong. “Some type of procedure” would be necessary, Balelo said, but he did not specify which. A full Tommy John surgery would have Ohtani out, even as a hitter, until sometime in the first half of next season (maybe longer, depending on the impact of rehabbing a second Tommy John). But if they tried to treat it with rest and PRP injections? Or a repair procedure? Or an internal bracing procedure? It’s conceivable that Ohtani could miss almost no time at all as a hitter, and come back as a pitcher sooner, too. I wouldn’t call that likely, but, as Ken Rosenthal explores in the various options here, it’s possible.
Ah, but you know the big caveat here! Balelo is Ohtani’s agent on the eve if the biggest free agency in baseball history. He has every incentive in the world to downplay the serious risk that a UCL tear poses to Ohtani’s pitching/two-way career. Of course it was always possible – probable? – that Ohtani would come back as a pitcher eventually, but the timeline AND the future performance are necessarily going to be uncertain.
We’ll see if a decision on treatment is made before free agency, or whether that will be part of the early offseason conversations with teams. On the one hand, you’d love for him to make the decision sooner rather than later so that he could return sooner rather than later, but on the other hand, if there is a question about which route to go – and the short-term and long-term ramifications – it’s conceivable that interested suitors might have differing opinions on which route is best, and which they’d see as more or less financially risky.
Then again, sometimes you don’t know just how involved the procedure will be until the surgeon actually gets in there and makes a final determination.
Meanwhile, Ohtani was a late scratch yesterday as DH due to what the team called oblique tightness. So who knows how much more Ohtani plays this year.
