Browsing: slump

Oct 18, 2025, 01:06 AM ET

SALT LAKE CITY — Nick Schmaltz came into the night scoreless over the Utah Mammoth’s first four games this season. He broke through in a big way Friday night against the San Jose Sharks.

Schmaltz had three goals and an assist, and the Mammoth beat the Sharks 6-3 for their third win in four games.

“I feel like I’ve had a lot of chances early on in the season here,” Schmaltz said. “I’m trying to shoot the puck more, take it to the net, be around the net more. Couple guys made some great plays to find me in open areas. It was fun to see [them] go in there for me.”

Utah coach Andre Tourigny believed Schmaltz was due to get on the scoreboard.

Nick Schmaltz came into the night scoreless over the Mammoth’s first four games but broke through in a big way, recording three goals and an assist in Utah’s win over San Jose. Rob Gray/Imagn Images

“Since the start of the season, he’s been playing really good,” Tourigny said. “He’s had a lot of opportunities. He reloads really well, both sides of the puck, he’s a threat. He gets inside a lot. It was a matter of time … today was the day.”

Schmaltz scored his first goal 9:39 into the first period as he converted a one-timer off a pass from Logan Cooley on the inside edge of the right circle on a five-on-three power play.

Schmaltz got his second of the night less than four minutes later as he got a pass from Clayton Keller and fired a shot into the top left corner past Yaroslav Askarov.

The Sharks tied it with a pair of goals 1:50 apart in the second.

After Liam O’Brien regained Utah’s lead with 3:51 left in the middle period, Schmaltz finished his second career hat trick 54 seconds into the third. He got a pass from Keller — who had assists on each of Schmaltz’s three goals — from behind the net and scored from the left side to push Utah’s lead to 4-2.

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“It was awesome, especially in front of our home fans,” said Schmaltz, whose first hat trick came for Arizona against St. Louis on Jan. 26, 2023. “Shout-out to my grandpa, he’s watched me play two times now, in Arizona and here, and he’s seen a hat trick both times.”

Schmaltz then set up Keller for a goal with 8½ minutes to go to push the Mammoth’s lead to 6-2, giving both players four points on the night.

“Just a high give-and-go. I saw him open, and he made a great shot to finish it.”

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LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani showed a bit of pulse at the plate when he led off Game 3 of the National League Championship Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers by lining a triple into the right field corner. He scored moments later on a Mookie Betts double.

Ohtani—the Dodgers’ 10-year, $700 million man—came into the game with one hit in the best-of-seven series against the listless Milwaukee Brewers, who now trail 3-0 after losing, 3-1, at Dodger Stadium Thursday night. Manager Dave Roberts was so concerned about Ohtani’s hitting that he moved him to the back of the NLCS pitching rotation.

Now he has Ohtani in place to close out the series with a mound start in Game 4 on Friday. After a 1-for-4 late afternoon ballgame with two strikeouts at the plate, he’s 2-for-11 in the series with no homers, five whiffs and a .641 OPS. But according to Roberts, he’s working his butt off trying to snap out of the slump.

At the same time, Ohtani’s preparing for a chance to clinch the team’s second consecutive NL pennant, the precursor of repeating as World Series champions.

How does Ohtani manage it? Well, he has 700 million reasons.

“He’s a unicorn,” Roberts said about the two-way Japanese player. “I don’t know how he manages it. Every minute of the day is accounted for.”

Before the series began, Roberts even went as far as saying the Dodgers can’t repeat as World Series champs unless Ohtani snaps out of his offensive funk. But here they are, one win away from putting themselves in position to compete against either Toronto or Seattle.

“He’s a big part of what we’re doing,” Roberts said. “We’re pitching very well. We’re playing great defense. Obviously Shohei is not in the form that we expect. But we have a long way to go.”

The supposition is that the workload for the 31-year-old Ohtani has caught up with him, even though he has made only one pitching start in the playoffs. In Game 1 of the NLDS against the Philadelphia Phillies, Ohtani threw six innings of three-run, three-hit ball with nine strikeouts in a 5-3 win.

Ohtani’s offensive numbers began to slip after he returned to pitching on June 16 after undergoing Sept. 2023 elbow surgery. His batting average dipped 18 points and his OPS slightly declined as the regular season ended. Still, he finished with 55 home runs, third among all players in the regular season.

The playoff drop off his been more severe. He opened just fine with two homers in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series against the Cincinnati Reds. In the two-game sweep, he hit .333 (3-for-9) with the two homers and four RBIs.

But between a four-game victory over the Phillies in the NLDS   and this NLCS, he’s fallen off the map. He’s gone 3-for-29(.103) with no homers, a pair of RBIs, 14 strikeouts and five walks, three of them intentional.

Ohtani, though, doesn’t believe pitching has anything to do with his extended slump at the plate.

“I don’t necessarily think that the pitching has affected my hitting performance,” he said through his interpreter. ”Just on the pitching side, as long as I control what I can control, I feel pretty good about putting up results. On the hitting side, just the stance, the mechanics, that’s something that I do—it’s a constant work in progress.”

A left-handed hitter and a right-handed pitcher, Ohtani has seen a steady diet of left-handed pitching thrown at him. When the Brewers started left-handed reliever Aaron Ashby Thursday, Ohtani surprisingly fell behind in the count before launching the triple, which had an exit velocity of 82 mph off Ohtani’s bat.

“He’s one of the best hitters in the game,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “He [has not been] hitting the way he can. We’re not doing anything very special except we’re pitching him very carefully. Any time we can bring in a lefty to face him, that’s what we’ll do. He’s not barreling the ball like he does, but to us he’s still a dangerous, dangerous hitter.”

To Murphy’s point, Ohtani is a .264 lifetime hitter against left-handed pitching, .282 overall. But while his strategy is working well negating Ohtani, the Brewers have their own problems. They’ve scored three runs and amassed just nine hits in three games against Dodgers pitching.

If Ohtani continues that trend on the mound Friday, it won’t matter how he hits. The Brewers will be finished, and the Dodgers will be on to the World Series.

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Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani has struggled at the plate recently, but he said his hitting slump is not a result of his pitching duties.

“I don’t necessarily think that the pitching has affected my hitting performance,” Ohtani told reporters through an interpreter. “Just on the pitching side, as long as I control what I can control, I feel pretty good about putting up results. On the hitting side, just the stance, the mechanics, that’s something that I do — it’s a constant work in progress. I don’t necessarily think so. It’s hard to say.”

Ohtani played well in the wild-card round but has since gone 2-for-25 with 12 strikeouts. He snapped a 15-at-bat hitless streak with an RBI single in the seventh inning of Tuesday’s Game 2 win over the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS.

Ohtani did not pitch in Game 1 of the NLCS as the Dodgers went instead to Blake Snell. Manager Dave Roberts said before the series that Ohtani would pitch at some point, but he wasn’t sure when.

Roberts said before the series that the pitching plan for Ohtani was not related to his hitting struggles.

“No, not at all,” Roberts said. “I think it was just kind of Shohei’s going to pitch one game this series. So, it’s one game and then you have two other guys that potentially can pitch on regular rest.”

Luckily for the Dodgers, Ohtani’s slump hasn’t hurt them too much thanks to outstanding performances from their starters. Snell gave up just one hit in eight innings in the 2-1 win in Game 1, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitched a complete game in Game 2, allowing just three hits and one run.

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At 5:37 p.m. Wednesday, Michael Bubleâ€s “Feeling Good” blared from the Dodger Stadium speakers.

Shohei Ohtani came strolling to the plate with a bat in his hands.

There was no one in the stands, of course. Nor an opposing pitcher on the mound. The Dodgers, on this workout day after returning from Milwaukee, were still some 22 hours away from resuming their National League Championship Series against the Brewers. For any other player, it would have been a routine affair.

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Ohtani, however, is not just any player.

And among the many things that make him unique, his habit of almost never taking batting practice on the field is one of the small but notable ones.

Which made his decision to do so Wednesday a telling development.

Over the last two weeks, Ohtani has been in a slump. Since the start of the NL Division Series, he is just two-for-25 with a whopping 12 strikeouts. He has been smothered by left-handed pitching. He has made poor swing decisions and failed to slug the ball.

Last week, manager Dave Roberts went so far as to say the Dodgers were “not gonna win the World Series with that sort of performance†from their $700-million slugger.

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Thus, out Ohtani came for batting practice on Wednesday in the most visible sign yet of his urgency for a turnaround.

“The other way to say it is that, if I hit, we will win,†Ohtani said in Japanese when asked about Roberts†World Series quote earlier Wednesday afternoon. “I think he thinks that if I hit, we will win. Iâ€d like to do my best to do that.â€

In Roberts†view, Ohtani has already started improving from his woeful NLDS, when he struck out nine times in 18 trips to the plate against a left-handed-heavy Philadelphia Phillies staff that, as president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman emphatically put it, had “the most impressive execution against a hitter I’ve ever seen.â€

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In Game 1 of the NLCS against the Brewers, Ohtani was 0-for-two but walked three times; twice intentionally but another on a more disciplined five-pitch at-bat to lead off the game against left-handed opener Aaron Ashby.

The following night, he went only one-for-five with three more strikeouts, giving him 15 this postseason, second-most in the playoffs. But he did have an RBI single, marking his first run driven in since Game 2 of the NLDS. He followed that with a steal, swiping his first bag of the playoffs. And earlier in the game, he scorched a lineout to right at 115.2 mph, the hardest heâ€d hit a ball since taking Cincinnati Reds pitcher Hunter Greene deep in the teamâ€s postseason opener.

“The first two games in Milwaukee, his at-bats have been fantastic,†Roberts said Wednesday, before heading out to the field and watching Ohtaniâ€s impromptu BP session.

“That’s what I’ve been looking for. That’s what I’m counting on,†he added, while noting the careful approach the Brewers have also taken with the soon-to-be four-time MVP. “You can only take what they give you. So for me, I think he’s in a good spot right now.â€

Shohei Ohtani puts the ball in play in the third inning during Game 4 of the NLDS. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Ohtaniâ€s overall numbers, of course, continue to suggest otherwise. His .147 postseason batting average is second-worst on the team, ahead of only Andy Pages. His seven-game drought without an extra-base hit is longer than any he endured in the regular season.

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“The first thing I have to do is increase the level of my at-bats,†Ohtani said in Japanese. “Swing at strikes and not swing at balls.â€

On Wednesday, Ohtaniâ€s slump also led to questions about his role as a two-way player, and whether his return to pitching this season (and, this October, doing it for the first time in the playoffs) has contributed to his sudden struggles at the plate.

After all, on days Ohtani pitched this season, he hit .222 with four home runs but 21 strikeouts. On the days immediately following an outing, he batted .147 with two home runs and 10 strikeouts.

His current slump began with a hitless, four-strikeout dud in Game 1 of the NLDS, when he also made a six-inning, three-run start on the mound.

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And in days since, Roberts has acknowledged some likely correlation between Ohtaniâ€s two roles.

“[His offense] hasnâ€t been good when heâ€s pitched,†Roberts said following the NLDS. “Weâ€ve got to think through this and come up with a better game plan.â€

Ohtani, on the other hand, pushed back somewhat on that narrative during Wednesdayâ€s workout, in which he also threw a bullpen session in preparation for his next start in Game 4 of the NLCS on Friday.

While it is “more physically strenuous†to handle both roles, he conceded, he countered that “I donâ€t know if thereâ€s a direct correlation.â€

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“Physically,†he added, “I donâ€t feel like thereâ€s a connection.â€

Instead, Ohtani on Wednesday went about fixing his swing the way any other normal hitter would. He went out on the field for his rare session of batting practice. Of his 32 swings, he sent 14 over the fence, including one that clanked off the roof of the right-field pavilion.

“Certainly, there’s frustration,†Roberts said of how heâ€s seen Ohtani handle his uncharacteristic lack of performance.

But, he added, “that’s expected. I don’t mind it. I like the edge.â€

“He’s obviously a very, very talented player, and we’re counting on him,†Roberts continued. “Heâ€s just a great competitor. He’s very prepared. And thereâ€s still a lot of baseball left.â€

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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