Culture
In a World Series built on stars, Shohei Ohtani’s absence would be diminishing
LOS ANGELES — It’s too soon to panic, too soon to form any opinion, really. If the initial diagnosis the Los Angeles Dodgers offered on Shohei Ohtani proves correct, he could very well be in the lineup Monday night for Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium.
Still, the injury Ohtani suffered to his left shoulder Saturday night cast a pall over Dodger Stadium, quieting the raucous crowd and creating an uneasiness rarely experienced by a team leading the Series two games to none.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Ohtani has a subluxation, a condition that occurs when the ball at the top of the upper arm bone comes out of the socket only partially, as opposed to completely, which happens during a dislocation.
If that’s all this is, it might not be a big deal, particularly short-term. Roberts said Ohtani’s strength was great, his range of motion good. But he cautioned that the Dodgers will not know more until Ohtani undergoes an MRI. Savvy fans understand that no diagnosis matters until the doctors check the scans. And given the Dodgers’ history with injuries, no one should assume Ohtani will be leading off Monday night at Yankee Stadium just yet.
The absence of Ohtani for even one game would diminish a series built on stars, from the likely MVPs, Ohtani and Aaron Judge, to the superstar right fielders, Mookie Betts and Juan Soto, to another likely Hall of Famer, Freddie Freeman, and a potential one, Giancarlo Stanton. The Series also features the two highest-paid pitchers in total value, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Gerrit Cole. Yamamoto, making his World Series debut Saturday night, allowed only one hit in 6 1/3 innings, a homer by Soto.
Ohtani, though, is at the center of it all. He suffered his injury Saturday night sliding into second base on an attempted steal in the seventh inning, with the Dodgers leading, 4-1. He was in obvious pain, rolling on the dirt, then slowly getting to his feet before an athletic trainer helped him walk off the field, supporting his left arm.
Ohtani is slow to get up after he attempted to steal 2nd. pic.twitter.com/T3Af5GRaiw
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 27, 2024
For a recent comparison, consider the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr., who reportedly sustained at least four subluxations in 2021. Tatis initially did not undergo surgery, believing his shoulder to be stable. But he reversed course in September 2022 while serving an 80-game suspension for using a banned performance-enhancing substance. Doctors repaired the labrum in his left shoulder. Tatis recovered by the time he was reinstated in April 2023. And that season, he appeared in 141 games.
Might Ohtani eventually meet the same fate? Perhaps, if he endures repeated subluxations. Treatment for shoulder instability includes both non-operative and surgical options, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. Ohtani, of course, is still recovering from major surgery on his right elbow, with the expectation he will pitch again in 2025. But even after stealing 59 bases this season as a full-time designated hitter, he almost certainly will limit his attempts once he returns to the mound, reducing the wear and tear on his body.
If Ohtani misses time during the Series, the Dodgers can adjust by moving Betts to the leadoff spot and making Freeman their DH. Max Muncy could move from third base to first and Kiké Hernández could play third. Roberts could round out his infield with some combination of Gavin Lux, Tommy Edman and Miguel Rojas, with Andy Pages playing center on days Edman replaces Rojas at short.
Not a bad collection of players, even though Freeman is playing on a severely sprained right ankle and Rojas will require sports hernia surgery during the offseason. Ohtani was only 1-for-8 in the first two games of the Series, his one hit a ringing double off Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle in Game 1. But obviously, he’s an essential part of the Dodgers’ offense.
After striking out 10 times in 22 plate appearances in the Division Series, Ohtani broke out in the National League Championship Series, batting .364 with a 1.185 OPS. He has been an absolute terror in the postseason with runners in scoring position, going 15-for-22 in those situations.
With or without Ohtani, the Dodgers are in excellent position. The only way they will lose the Series is if they drop four of the next five games — not out of the question with the Series shifting to New York for Games 3, 4 and 5 (if necessary), but not all that likely, either. The Yankees have their own problems, most notably the performance of likely MVP Aaron Judge, who is batting .150 in the postseason with a .605 OPS and 19 strikeouts in 50 plate appearances.
The Dodgers being the Dodgers, they would use any absence by Ohtani as a rallying point. Betts was out nearly two months this season with a fractured left hand. Freeman was away for 10 days while his son Max, 3, dealt with Guillain-Barré syndrome, and later missed time with a broken finger and his ankle problem. And lest we forget, the Dodgers also placed 12 starting pitchers on the injured list.
No one should portray this team as an underdog, not when its estimated $325 million payroll was second only to the New York Mets. The Dodgers leveraged their financial might to build extraordinary depth. So even while somewhat depleted, their roster is strong enough for the club to be within two wins of its first World Series title since 2020, and its first in a full season since 1988.
The continuing presence of Ohtani would further enhance the Dodgers’ chances, and his return for Game 3 seemed quite possible, at least the way Roberts was talking. By now, we’ve all learned that underestimating Ohtani is foolish. Seriously, would anyone be surprised if he returned to hit the Series-clinching homer, and then defied the Dodgers’ insistence that he will not pitch again this season by earning the Series-clinching save?
All right, that’s a bit much to ask. Let’s just hope Ohtani plays again in the Series. Any time he misses will diminish baseball’s biggest spectacle in years. And as his past injuries have shown, every day he is out is a lesser day for the sport.
(Top photo of Shohei Ohtani exiting the field in Game 2: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
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