Dodgers working overtime to pitch Ohtani narrative

Stan Kasten said the Dodgers won’t be sold.On a completely unrelated note, general manager Brandon Gomes insisted that Shohei Ohtani didn’t stop hitting because of his injuries.The two-way player is just “a victim of his own greatness,” Gomes said.What a relief.Silly me, here I was thinking the Dodgers were cooked because Ohtani was shaking his arm and hitting on one leg the other night.Turned out my unrealistic expectations of Ohtani have the same psychedelic properties as magic mushrooms.“We’re really hard on Shohei if he struggles for a little bit, and then it’s up in arms,” Gomes said.“I don’t think there’s anything overly concerning at this point.”Whom should I believe, Andrew Friedman’s better-looking clone or my lying eyes?Ohtani is six for his last 46.He has homered only once in the last 21 games he’s played outside of Coors Field in high-altitude Denver.The numbers are making me hallucinate, evidently.Team officials described Ohtani as day-to-day and downplayed their worries about what he might look like in the playoffs.“I’m very confident that we’ll see the guy we all expect to see,” manager Dave Roberts said.Gomes said Ohtani might even pitch again this season.Such a perception of reality would certainly be easier for the Dodgers to stomach than the alternate view, which is that they were negligent in how they managed Ohtani and failed to protect him from himself.Gomes said the Dodgers always had the situation under control.

His contention was that Ohtani didn’t offer any reasons to be alarmed until his four-strikeout game on Wednesday night.Once the team’s decision-makers saw that, Gomes said, they leaped into action and kept Ohtani out of the lineup the next day for the series finale against the St.

Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium.Roberts said he informed Ohtani of the decision to give him a break over a text message, to which Ohtani responded with a saluting face emoji.Gomes boasted of how well the Dodgers ha...