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By Kim Kyung-hyun / MyDaily — Shohei Ohtani of the LA Dodgers, who’s chasing his first Cy Young Award, is facing a new dilemma: his sweeper has emerged as a double-edged sword. A Japanese commentator flagged the issue after Tuesday’s start.
On May 21 (Korean time), Ohtani started as the leadoff hitter and the Dodgers’ starting pitcher in a road game against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park in San Diego, California.
He worked five scoreless innings, allowing three hits, two walks and striking out four, picking up his fourth win (4–2). At the plate he went 2-for-4 with a home run, a walk, two runs scored and an RBI.
The scoreless outing dropped his ERA to 0.73. He still hasn’t logged enough innings to qualify for the official leaderboard, but that mark sits at roughly half of Major League leader Cam Schlittler’s 1.50 ERA.
One disappointment: his streak of quality starts — at least six innings with three or fewer earned runs — ended. He threw 88 pitches and seemed capable of going deeper, but exited the game sooner than many expected.
The Padres made him work, extending numerous at-bats past five pitches. San Diego hitters repeatedly fouled pitches off and forced Ohtani into longer, more contested battles.
Japan’s Full Count quoted commentator Toshihiro Noguchi saying Ohtani’s command was uneven: his fastball sometimes caught the plate and his sweeper didn’t always bite. Noguchi added that Ohtani rarely landed pitches where he intended, and he didn’t look especially fired up — it wasn’t a performance he’d be satisfied with.
Noguchi specifically warned about the sweeper. “Ohtani’s sweeper has big movement and excellent life, so it can be an overwhelming weapon,” he said. “But if he throws it too often, his body tends to rotate more horizontally. That makes it harder to command his other pitches, because turning the body sideways increases the break on that pitch and can throw off overall control.”
The sweeper has been Ohtani’s primary putaway pitch. Baseball Savant credits it with a 0.093 batting average against. Among pitches he’s thrown at least 80 times, it ranks second only to the curveball (0), and it boasts a hefty 40.2% whiff rate.
Still, when his command slips the sweeper becomes dangerous. The double-play ball induced on Fernando Tatis Jr. with one out and the bases loaded in the fifth inning came on a sweeper. That ball left the bat at 94.6 mph (152.2 km/h) with an expected batting average of 0.430 — had it not been hit directly at a fielder, the pitch could have produced a very different, costly outcome.
Noguchi added, “If I were batting, I’d look for the sweeper until I fell behind two strikes. Visualize its trajectory coming inside toward the middle, and when it arrives, attack it. Compared with a 100 mph (160.9 km/h) fastball, I think it’s the pitch you can square up more often.”
Full Count pointed out that Ohtani’s sweeper has produced some of his most memorable moments — it was the pitch that struck out Mike Trout swinging for the final out of the 2023 WBC championship game against the United States. But the same pitch has also hurt him: in Game 4 of last year’s World Series, a sweeper that drifted into the middle near the batter’s shoulder was driven by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays for a go-ahead two-run homer.
How Ohtani deploys the sweeper this season could very well help decide whether he takes home the Cy Young.
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