Tim Neverett is back in a PNC Park broadcast booth this week, and the old ballpark is giving him two stories at once: a homecoming and a front-row look at Shohei Ohtani’s pitching revival. The former Pirates broadcaster returned for the Dodgers’ three-game series against Pittsburgh and will be on the call Wednesday night when Ohtani takes the mound in Game 2.
That start will be Ohtani’s eighth game at PNC Park, though he had never pitched in Pittsburgh before this series. On Tuesday night, he went 1 for 4 with two RBIs in the Dodgers’ 12-3 win in Game 1, and he entered the series as the National League OPS leader at.939. For a player still producing at the plate, his work on the mound has become the sharper question around the series, especially with the Dodgers trying to balance his weekly schedule against the rest of the season.
Neverett has spent most of the years since leaving Pittsburgh after the 2015 season on some of baseball’s biggest stages. He has worked four World Series broadcast teams since then, including Boston in 2018 and three more with the Dodgers in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But the memories that came back first were from Oct. 1, 2013, when the Pirates hosted the wild card game that turned PNC Park into a scene he has not forgotten.
“When I saw people hanging off the Clemente Bridge, trying to get a glimpse of the field during the wild card game, those are some of the baseball memories I’ll always have,” Neverett said before Game 1 on 105.9 The X with Tim Benz. He called it one of the greatest baseball environments he has ever seen in his life, even compared with the World Series broadcasts that followed.
What has stood out to him this year is not just that Ohtani is back on the mound, but how he is throwing. The 31-year-old is 6-2 with a 0.74 ERA and a 0.79 WHIP in 2026, a sharp line that comes after he skipped the 2024 season on the mound and did not resume pitching until June 16, 2025. Last season, he made 14 pitching appearances and posted a 2.87 ERA. This year, Neverett said, the fastball has returned to a different gear.
“Last year, he really didn’t unleash the fastball like he is this year,” Neverett said. “Consistently 97, 98, 99 mph. He can get up around 100. And the fastball command, everything else works off of that. He has been pinpoint in terms of his fastball accuracy.” He added that if Ohtani is not walking people, he is getting them out one way or another.
The Dodgers have answered with a schedule built around him. Neverett said Ohtani is essentially pitching once a week in a six-man rotation, and the club may even give him a day off from hitting after starts as it searches for the right rest formula. “To steal a term from the NBA: load management,” he said. “I hate the term. And I hate the way they use it in the NBA. But at the same time, I think it is working for Ohtani.”
That approach, he said, could leave Los Angeles better in October because Ohtani is functioning as a full-time member of the pitching staff. He also pointed to Roki Sasaki starting instead of coming out of the bullpen and the emergence of Justin Wrobleski, whose last two outings Neverett described as two of his best major league starts. The Dodgers are not just leaning on a star; they are trying to build a rotation that can survive the summer and still have enough left when the calendar turns.
The next checkpoint comes Wednesday night, when Neverett calls Ohtani’s latest start and the Dodgers keep moving through Pittsburgh. If this version of the rotation holds, the rest of the season may tell Los Angeles whether it has found the right formula at exactly the right time.
