Yahoo Sports senior MLB analysts Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman discuss the Shohei Ohtani injury and what it means for Game 3. Listen to the full conversation on the ‘Baseball Bar-B-Cast’ podcast – and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

View more

Video transcription

In the bottom of the seventh inning, Otani walks.

And so Otani, who hasn’t been nearly as aggressive on base in October as he was in the regular season, tries to spark something on Clay Holmes’ first pitch slider and takes a perfect throw from Austin Wells, a perfect tag from Glaber.

And at first you think, you know, the crowd is like, man, like that, that would have been cool.

And then it’s like, oh my God, he’s still there.

It’s like, oh, why is her Tony still on second base?

This wasn’t something I really experienced in this.

We’ve seen injuries before, but this was a moment where everything stopped and he was on the ground.

Is it his wrist?

It’s his arm we see on the replay.

He’s actually bracing himself with his left arm as he slides in feet first, and his arm is digging into the ground a little harder than he’d like, instead of dragging it across the ground like behind him when you normally would doing. see on such a slide.

And when you see it like that, you think: okay, is it the wrist?

Is it the shoulder there is, you know, the broadcast, Ken Roosevelt reports.

It’s a shoulder.

There are many people who speak Japanese and listen to the audio of the Japanese broadcast.

And Otani can reportedly be heard saying to the trainer in Japanese, like my shoulder popped out.

So that’s what happens.

But because he just hit and because there’s only a few left in him, like we won’t know, and he’s the DH, we won’t know if he’s taken out of the game.

That’s a key here because he obviously won’t come out of defense and he won’t strike again.

And so we both realized this right away and it’s like, okay, the next step is we all have to start asking, start liking you, because the set of options here is like, oh, maybe he just bumped it’s coming good with him, or it’s like he’s ready for the World Series.

Dave Roberts was like, yeah, it’s a shoulder in.

It’s a subluxation, which is essentially a certain level of dislocation.

But he said the strength tests Otani did were encouraging.

Does this mean they’ll put the shoulder back in and he’ll be fine?

Does that mean they’ll find out tomorrow when they do an MRI, whatever?

Don’t know.

But the thing is, Dave Roberts gave us something to sit on, but now everyone’s flying to New York in a few hours, including us.

And sometime tomorrow, the Dodgers have a practice in the Bronx on Sunday night.

Maybe we’ll get more information.

Maybe not.

Near