Shohei Ohtani did both jobs Wednesday and made the Dodgers’ 7-0 win over the Diamondbacks look almost routine. He went 3-for-4 with two walks, scored once and then came back to throw six shutout innings in a game that showed how dangerous he can be when both sides of his game are working at once.
The performance gave Los Angeles a clean win and put Ohtani back into the middle of the National League conversation. He reached base five times and lowered his ERA to 0.74 in the game, while his bat continued to look like the one that has carried him most of the season:.301/.420/.521 with a 165 OPS+, and an on-base percentage that led the NL in the source data.
What makes the night matter now is the timing. The Dodgers had played 62 games, and Ohtani had logged 61 innings, which left him just short of the innings threshold required to qualify for the ERA title. One seven-inning outing would get him there, and he was still sitting on a sub-1.00 ERA with a better-than-.400 on-base percentage.
That gap has been shaped by how Los Angeles has handled him. Early in the season, the Dodgers gave Ohtani time to rest and kept him out of the lineup during some of his starts, then gave him another day off after one of them. The public line around the slowdown was cautious, but the effect was plain enough: the club was protecting him, and the numbers were waiting for a longer stretch of innings.
Wednesday’s outing offered the strongest sign yet that the reset may have worked. Ohtani allowed only two hits and one walk while striking out six, and the Diamondbacks never found a way to break through. His recent struggles appeared to be behind him, and his on-base streak that began last year had pushed into the top 25 all-time.
What comes next is simple and meaningful. If the Dodgers let Ohtani stay on his current path, the next seven-inning start would move him onto the ERA leaderboard and turn a brilliant two-way performance into something even bigger: a place among the National League rate leaders as well as one of the sport’s most productive hitters.
