Shohei Ohtani hasn't homered since August 18. He's 3 for 20 this postseason, slashing a wretched .156/.283/.200 over his last eight weeks of baseball. The temptation is to make him the story, the single point of failure explaining why the defending champs are staring down a 2-0 hole against Milwaukee. That temptation should be resisted, because it lets everyone else off the hook.
The Dodgers are 2-for-26 with runners in scoring position this October. Both hits belong to Andy Pages. Eleven of their 19 runs this month have come via home run, which means when the ball isn't leaving the yard, this lineup is functionally silent. That's not an Ohtani problem. That's a team that can't manufacture anything once a game tightens.
The bullpen gap is the real series, not the batting order
Twice now, Milwaukee's relievers have strangled the Dodgers late. In Game 2, Mookie Betts' fifth-inning groundout briefly looked like progress, a sacrifice-fly setup that pushed across a go-ahead run. Instead it kicked off a stretch of 15 straight outs recorded by Brewers relievers. Across the first two games, six Milwaukee arms, led by Aaron Ashby, Abner Uribe, and Trevor Megill, have let just five of 33 batters reach base.
That's the series. Los Angeles has been good enough to rough up Milwaukee's starters early, chasing Jacob Misiorowski in Game 1 and Logan Henderson in Game 2 after a pair of throwing errors. But neither win nor loss gets decided in the fifth inning anymore. It gets decided by whichever bullpen owns the seventh through ninth, and right now that's not close.
The margins were thinner than the final score suggests
Game 2 had at least three hinge points that had nothing to do with Ohtani's bat. Will Smith let two borderline two-strike pitches go against Brice Turang in the first and third innings, both leading to runs. Dave Roberts pulled Roki Sasaki after four innings in favor of lefty Kris Bubic, who immediately surrendered a game-tying homer to William Contreras. And a Brock Stewart pickoff throw sailed away in the sixth, handing Milwaukee another run it didn't earn on contact.
None of that excuses a lineup hitting .077 with runners in scoring position this postseason. But it's a reminder that Yoshinobu Yamamoto, arguably this October's best pitcher, got lifted after just 75 pitches and eight outs partly because of decisions and execution around him, not because he was getting hit hard.
Ohtani plays unless Ohtani says otherwise
The Dodgers aren't benching their best player because the box score looks ugly. The plan, per a team source, is to check in with Ohtani about the lingering left knee and right bicep issues that have dogged him, and sit him only if he says he's compromised. If he feels right, he plays. That's not organizational stubbornness, it's a bet that a healthy Ohtani snaps out of this on talent alone, and that the alternative, a lineup without its best hitter, is worse than a slumping one with him in it.
History is not on Los Angeles' side here. Thirty-six of the last 38 teams to fall behind 2-0 in a best-of-seven have been eliminated. The last time the Dodgers were down 0-2 in a playoff series, they got swept by Arizona in 2023 and responded that winter by signing Ohtani. The sequel to that story is still being written, but it won't be decided by one guy's batting average. It'll be decided by whether a lineup that lives on home runs can find a single hit when it actually needs one, and whether a bullpen that's been outclassed twice can find one clean inning before the margin for error disappears entirely.
