Shohei Ohtani won't need surgery and expects to return to two-way play in 2027

Shohei Ohtani will not require surgery and expects to return to two-way play, MLB.com's Sonja Chen reports — a significant piece of news for a Dodgers organization that spent the second half of 2026 watching its most singular player work through injury at reduced capacity.

What happened

Per Sonja Chen's reporting for MLB.com, Ohtani does not need surgery and anticipates returning to his role as both a pitcher and a hitter. The specifics of what that return looks like, however, remain uncertain. That last part is doing a lot of work in this story, and the Dodgers would probably prefer it weren't.

The broader picture had already been taking shape. Dodgers president Andrew Friedman said the club expects Ohtani to be fully healthy for 2027 Spring Training, per earlier reporting. Friedman also indicated the team's offseason spending approach remains "business as usual" heading into 2027, a framing that suggests Los Angeles does not intend to treat Ohtani's health situation as a reason to pull back from the market.

Why it matters

The question of Ohtani's two-way status is not a minor roster footnote. It is, in a meaningful sense, the organizing question of the Dodgers' entire 2027 construction. A fully healthy Ohtani pitching and hitting is a different roster calculus than an Ohtani who contributes in only one direction — and the club's decisions around depth, rotation construction, and lineup balance all flow from the answer.

Ohtani last pitched on July 3, per prior reporting, and his offensive production was significantly below his established levels during the recovery period. That context makes the no-surgery news genuinely meaningful: the worst-case structural scenarios appear to be off the table. What remains is the more nuanced question of how a return to the mound gets sequenced, and at what workload.

Is Ohtani expected to pitch in 2027?

The short answer, per the reporting, is that he expects to. The longer answer is that nobody has said exactly what that looks like yet. MLB.com's Chen notes the specifics are still up in the air, which is the honest version of where things stand roughly four months before Spring Training. The Dodgers have confirmed the direction; the details are still being worked out.

The numbers

The 2026 season line makes the injury context feel even more pointed. Ohtani posted a .275/.377/.512 slash with an .889 OPS, 30 home runs, 81 RBI, 11 stolen bases, 81 walks, and 152 strikeouts across 139 games and 618 plate appearances. Those are productive numbers by any reasonable standard — and they came with the acknowledged drag of a second-half injury affecting his offensive output. The floor, in other words, was still .275 with 30 home runs.

On the mound, the 2026 line was something else entirely. In 14 starts covering 85.2 innings, Ohtani went 8-2 with a 1.79 ERA, a 0.95 WHIP, 95 strikeouts, 26 walks, and just 4 home runs allowed. He stopped pitching after July 3. The 1.79 ERA and 0.95 WHIP across those 14 starts represent what the Dodgers were working with before the injury intervened — and what they are hoping, cautiously, to get back.

The gap between "last pitched July 3" and "expects to return to two-way form" is where all the interesting questions live. The numbers from the first half of 2026 establish what the ceiling looks like. The offseason will establish whether the path back to it is straightforward.

Where the club stands

The Dodgers finished the 2026 regular season 100-62 (.617), first in the NL West, and are currently riding a three-game winning streak. The roster around Ohtani is not standing still in the meantime.

A week removed from the Ohtani injury updates beginning to circulate, the club is also managing the news that catcher Dalton Rushing underwent surgery to repair a partially torn UCL in his right elbow — a separate and significant development for a young player the organization has invested in. And Teoscar Hernandez has been identified as a potential trade candidate heading into 2027, with the emergence of prospect Josue De Paula cited as a factor in that calculus.

The Dodgers, in other words, are doing what 100-win clubs do in October: sorting through a layered set of roster questions while the competitive window stays open. Ohtani's health is the largest of those questions, and the no-surgery news moves it from the anxiety column toward the patience column — which is a different, more manageable place to be.

What we don't know yet

The honest list here is not short. It is not yet known which injury or injuries prompted the concern — the reporting has referenced both knee and biceps in prior items, but the specific diagnosis has not been detailed in this report. It is not known what a return to two-way play looks like in terms of workload, sequencing, or whether there are any limitations being discussed. It is not known when Ohtani will resume throwing off a mound, or what the Spring Training ramp-up will look like.

What has been reported is the direction: no surgery, expects to pitch and hit again, targeting Spring Training. The architecture of how that gets built is still being drawn.

What to watch

The next meaningful data point will likely come from Spring Training, when the Dodgers' handling of Ohtani's workload — how early he throws, how many innings he's stretched out for, whether there are any announced limitations — will tell the story that the offseason reporting can only sketch. Friedman's "business as usual" framing on spending suggests the club is not waiting on Ohtani's health to make decisions, which means the roster around him may take shape before the full picture of his two-way availability is clear.

The Hernandez trade candidacy and the Rushing recovery timeline are the two threads most likely to surface first. But the Ohtani question — specifically, what "two-way" means in practice for 2027 — is the one that will define how the rest of the offseason gets read.