Offseason surgery is “not on the table” for Shohei Ohtani this winter, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said Wednesday, confirming that the team expects the two-way star to be back at full health for the beginning of next year.
The news comes on the heels of Ohtani’s injury-plagued 2026 campaign, in which he battled left knee and right arm issues for much of the summer.
After the team was eliminated from the National League Championship Series last week, Ohtani said he was not sure if he would need any offseason procedures.
Since then, Friedman said during an end-of-season press conference alongside general manager Brandon Gomes on Wednesday, Ohtani was assessed by doctors and told he just needed rest.
When asked about the specific nature of Ohtani’s injuries this year –– which the team only described as “inflammation” and “discomfort” during the course of the season –– Friedman remained vague, saying only that he “had a lot of different things going on.”
“It was just a little bit of an unfortunate game of whack-a-mole,” Friedman said. “The knee got to a better spot, and then just kinda the bicep area was bothering him. Just a number of different things. Some of it that would calm down for some period, some that would get re-irritated. It was just a lot of different things he was trying to contend with at once.”
Indeed, Ohtani’s injury saga came to define his 2026 season, gradually diminishing the two-way star’s otherworldly capabilities and leaving him significantly hampered entering October.
It started in mid-June, when Ohtani first began battling left knee inflammation following a start in Pittsburgh in which he felt flawed pitching mechanics caused irritation in his front landing leg.
It got worse in early July, when a right biceps issue Ohtani had quietly dealt with earlier in the year resurfaced during another two-way start at Dodger Stadium –– one that would prove to be his final pitching appearance of the season.
During the All-Star break, Ohtani was shut down from pitching while getting a lubricant injection in his knee.
Every attempt to ramp back up as a pitcher after that was scuttled by more injury-related setbacks, with both Ohtani’s arm and knee conditions failing to improve as the team had hoped.
Despite that, Ohtani continued in his hitting role as the Dodgers’ everyday DH, and remained productive at the plate for most of July and August (on Aug. 18, he had 30 home runs, a .294 batting average and an NL-best .949 OPS).
“Through mid-August,” Friedman noted, “he was still, I think, the consensus MVP.”
From there, however, the slugger’s performance plummeted.
He hit .157 over his final 18 regular-season games with no home runs and only one RBI. He spent two weeks on the injured list in September after showing visible pain in his swing. And, even amid continued insistence from both him and team officials that he was close to turning a corner, he went just 5-for-26 in the playoffs, failing to provide any impact production until his three-run homer in Game 4 of the NLCS –– a big swing that ultimately proved too little, too late.
Following the team’s sweep to the Brewers, Ohtani said he wanted to return to his two-way role next year.
On Wednesday, Friedman said the Dodgers also want him to return to pitching –– but that Ohtani and the team would need “to put our heads together” to decide exactly how his usage plan would look in 2027 and beyond.
“We have to all just figure it out together,” Friedman said. “And I’m not only expecting him to pitch –– we’re excited about him pitching. So now it’s about, how do we do that? How do we manage through a long season and have him at his best going into October? That’s a challenge. We have to figure that out together. And I’m confident that we will continue to learn from things as we go and continue to make it better.”
