Shohei Ohtani won't need surgery and expects to return as a two-way player

What happened

Shohei Ohtani will not need surgery and expects to return to two-way play, MLB.com reported, with Sonja Chen noting that how that return looks in practice remains up in the air. The Dodgers say they fully expect Ohtani to pitch in 2027 after he nursed two injuries during the 2026 season.

Dodgers president Andrew Friedman was more specific in remarks reported separately: the club expects Ohtani to be fully healthy for 2027 Spring Training, with no surgical intervention required on either the knee or the biceps.

Why it matters

Two-way players are rare enough that baseball has had to update its own rulebook to accommodate them — the 15-day injured list designation for pitchers and two-way players exists in part because of Ohtani's particular situation. When the sport's most singular talent spends a season managing two separate injuries without going under the knife, the offseason question isn't whether he'll be back. It's what "back" means.

That question, per MLB.com, is genuinely open. The Dodgers have said they expect him to pitch. They have not said how often, in what capacity, or at what point in the spring that picture will sharpen. For a franchise that built its roster construction around Ohtani's dual value — lineup presence and rotation depth in the same roster spot — the answer carries real operational weight heading into 2027 planning.

The two-way designation matters beyond the philosophical. Under general league mechanics, a two-way player on the injured list falls under the 15-day IL structure reserved for pitchers and two-way players, rather than the 10-day IL available to position players. That distinction affects how a club manages its 40-man roster and active roster flexibility across a long season. When the player in question is also the most prominent bat in your lineup, the administrative math gets interesting in a hurry.

The numbers

Los Angeles finished the regular season at 100-62 (.617), sitting first in the NL West and riding a three-game winning streak. That record reflects a club that did not need Ohtani to pitch in order to win at an elite rate, which is either reassuring context for the injury news or a quiet reminder of how deep this roster runs — probably both.

A 100-win club has a certain amount of cushion built into its offseason posture. The Dodgers are not approaching 2027 from a position of urgency, and Friedman's public comments reflect that. The franchise's .617 winning percentage is the kind of number that lets a front office take a measured approach to a star player's recovery rather than rushing a timeline.

Where the club stands

The Dodgers are 100-62 (.617), leading the NL West, and carry a W3 streak. The Ohtani injury situation did not derail the season. Whether it shapes the offseason is a different matter.

Friedman said the team's spending approach heading into the 2027 offseason remains "business as usual," a phrase that, coming from the Dodgers, carries a particular kind of weight. The club has not indicated that Ohtani's health status changes its financial posture.

A 100-win season provides a useful frame for reading that comment. A front office that just watched its club go 100-62 without full two-way contributions from its centerpiece player has some evidence on its side when it says the plan hasn't changed. Whether that confidence extends to specific roster decisions — rotation depth, catching depth, bullpen construction — will become clearer as the offseason develops.

Is Ohtani pitching in 2027?

The Dodgers say yes. Friedman's remarks, reported in the days surrounding the MLB.com piece, were direct: the club fully expects Ohtani to pitch in 2027. What that looks like — rotation starter, limited innings, a gradual ramp — has not been specified. MLB.com's framing, per Sonja Chen, is that the return to two-way form is the expectation, but the shape of it remains uncertain.

That uncertainty is not unusual for this stage of an offseason. Players recovering from in-season injuries typically don't have their spring workload mapped out in October. What's notable here is that the Dodgers are drawing a clear line between "needs surgery" and "needs time," and they're firmly on the second side of it.

The absence of surgery also removes one of the more concrete scheduling anchors an organization would otherwise have. A surgical procedure comes with a recovery window, a target date, a progression of milestones. The path Ohtani is on is less structured by definition — which may be good news medically and a more open question operationally.

The broader picture

Ohtani was not the only Dodger dealing with injury news around this time. Catcher Dalton Rushing underwent surgery to repair a partially torn UCL in his right elbow, the club announced. The two situations are structurally different — Rushing's procedure is complete, while Ohtani's path forward involves no surgery at all — but together they sketch a franchise managing its medical calendar with the same deliberateness it applies to its payroll.

The Dodgers have not connected the two situations publicly, and there is no basis to do so here. A 100-win club heading into an offseason is still a club with a training staff that had a busy autumn.

What the Rushing situation does illustrate, in a general sense, is how quickly a roster's depth assumptions can shift. UCL repairs for catchers follow their own recovery arcs, and the club will be navigating that timeline alongside whatever Ohtani's spring ramp-up looks like. The front office, per Friedman, says it is proceeding as planned on the spending front regardless.

What we don't know yet

MLB.com's headline says the return to two-way form is expected but that "how that looks is up in the air," and that framing is doing real work. The specific injuries Ohtani managed in 2026 — knee and biceps, per Friedman — have not been elaborated on in terms of severity, treatment, or what the recovery arc looks like from here.

There is no reported timetable for when Ohtani will resume throwing, no indication of whether he'll be on any kind of innings limit in 2027, and no detail on what "fully healthy for Spring Training" means in terms of workload. Spring Training itself is months away. A lot of that picture will fill in gradually, and the Dodgers have not suggested they're in a hurry to draw it.

The honest answer to most of the follow-up questions a fan might have — how many starts, what kind of workload, whether the knee and biceps issues are fully resolved or simply managed — is that the material doesn't say, and the club hasn't said. That is not a gap in the reporting so much as an accurate reflection of where things stand in October.

What to watch

The first concrete signal will likely come from Spring Training reports — whether Ohtani is taking the mound in live sessions, whether he's on a standard starter's schedule, or whether the club is managing his arm with any visible caution. Friedman's "business as usual" spending comment suggests the front office isn't treating this as a crisis, but the roster decisions that follow — particularly around rotation depth — will tell their own story about how much certainty the club actually has.

Any reporting on Ohtani's throwing program between now and February will carry outsized significance. A two-way player returning from a knee and a biceps issue in the same season is navigating two separate recovery tracks simultaneously, and the sequencing of when each is cleared for full activity will shape what the Dodgers can realistically plan around.

For now, the Dodgers have a 100-win season behind them, a two-way star who avoided surgery, and an offseason that, per their president, proceeds as planned. The details, as Sonja Chen noted for MLB.com, remain to be worked out.