UTK Special 11/5/25
The Offseason Strikes Back
John Smoltz is right that the physical toll of being Shohei Ohtani is immense. What he’s missing is that this isn’t a story about how hard it is — it’s about how limited everyone else’s thinking has become. The Dodgers have Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, two of the most interesting case studies in modern pitching, and they’re redefining what workload and recovery mean. Yamamoto coming out of the pen for the final eight outs of the World Series, a day after throwing 96 pitches, wasn’t reckless. It was revelation. It told us that the boundaries we draw around what pitchers can do might be self-imposed, outdated, and built on bad data.
Every generation has its version of “don’t do that, it’ll break you.” We’ve had pitch counts, innings limits, rest days, load management, and now biomechanical flagging that can detect a stress pattern before it becomes an injury. And yet, arms still blow. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring the science — it’s that we’ve calcified around it. Teams have fallen into a pattern where they treat pitchers like lab rats but forget that every one of them is a separate experiment. Yamamoto’s recovery profile isn’t the same as Ohtani’s. Ohtani’s isn’t the same as Max Scherzer’s or Paul Skenes’. There’s no universal law of rest. There’s only adaptation.
Pitchers are engineered systems — complex, variable, full of feedback loops. If you treat them like machines that need scheduled oil changes, you miss the point. They’re more like ecosystems, constantly rebalancing based on stress, hydration, nutrition, sleep, and a thousand invisible signals. Yamamoto’s appearance in Game 7 was the baseball equivalent of someone climbing Everest without oxygen — not sustainable, but proof of possibility. It wasn’t bravado; it was an outlier event that should force us to question our baselines.
The next leap in baseball won’t come from MLB. It’ll come from the chaos of college baseball — the one level of the sport that still operates without uniformity, where the schedule makes no sense, and where the pressure to innovate has replaced the pressure to survive. NIL money and the transfer portal have created a new kind of player mobility. There’s no incentive to wait for a pro team to figure it out when a college can hand you the tools and the data right now.
Somewhere out there, a college program is about to fuse its pitching lab with its engineering school and start treating its athletes like prototypes. Imagine what happens when biomechanics students and computer vision researchers start working alongside strength coaches and pitching coordinators. Imagine when a kinesiology department starts publishing its own internal R&D reports on real-time muscle recovery. Or when an aerospace student builds a fatigue model for torque thresholds. It’s not that far-fetched — it’s the natural evolution of the sport.
The pros have become risk-averse. They talk about “development pipelines” and “player protection,” but what they’ve really built are systems designed to eliminate variance. College baseball, though, lives on variance. Doubleheaders, midweek games, travel fatigue — all the things that supposedly ruin pitchers are exactly the things that might lead to the next leap in understanding. With the right minds in the room, one of these schools is going to reverse-engineer the whole workload paradigm. They’ll build a program where pitchers throw often, recover better, and adapt faster because the entire system is built around personal baselines, not generalized charts.
The secret won’t be throwing less. It’ll be recovering smarter. That’s the lesson from Ohtani and Yamamoto — they’re both products of developmental systems in Japan that emphasized holistic preparation and mechanical precision. Their workloads were managed, not minimized. The emphasis was on harmony, not restriction. Contrast that with MLB’s obsession with pitch counts and “days off,” and it’s no wonder why pitchers keep getting hurt anyway. The body doesn’t reset based on a calendar. It resets based on readiness, and most teams still can’t measure that accurately.
The first program that figures out how to quantify readiness in real time — using biomarkers, motion tracking, and individualized recovery models — is going to change the game. And it’s going to happen on a college campus long before it does in Dodger Stadium. MLB is too bureaucratic, too entrenched in the language of liability. Colleges can move fast, fail quietly, and iterate.
In a few years, we could be talking about some 20-year-old who throws 150 innings, closes twice a week, and never breaks down in the same awed tone we use when Paul Skenes is on the mound. The traditionalists will scream. The doctors will warn. And yet, the data will show that the human arm, when properly trained, conditioned, and personalized, can handle far more than we thought. Yamamoto just showed us a glimpse of it on the biggest stage in the world.
The next revolution in pitching won’t come from the mound. It’ll come from the lab. Whoever builds that bridge between biomechanics and boldness will own the future of baseball.
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The Dodgers aren’t ruining baseball - they’re exposing it. They’re pulling the curtain back on a system that claims to care about “competitive balance” while most of its billionaires hide behind spreadsheets and excuses. The luxury tax isn’t a cap right now, it’s a cover story. It’s a way for owners to pretend restraint is virtue. The Dodgers saw through that years ago. They realized the tax is just a toll booth, and the road beyond it is lined with trophies, profits, and sold-out nights in Chavez Ravine.
Mark Walter and his group aren’t baseball romantics. They’re private equity and insurance guys, people who understand time value, leverage, and annuities. They know that sustained relevance compounds. The Dodgers are a living financial instrument that spits out wins and cash flow in equal measure. They’ve cracked the code that most owners refuse to even read. When they signed Mookie Betts (when John Henry wouldn’t) and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani, that wasn’t reckless spending, it was rebalancing their portfolio. If they land Munetaka Murakami, that’s just another blue-chip investment paying future dividends.
So now, as we inch toward the 2027 CBA and the league starts whispering about a salary cap, the Dodgers have every reason to blow the doors off before the accountants arrive. Spend now. Trade later. Add payroll like oxygen. Because here’s the truth: the problem isn’t that the Dodgers spend too much, it’s that almost no one else spends enough.
The Mets are reloading. The Yankees never stop preening but they’ve stopped paying despite still having one of the strongest revenue systems and market. The Rangers bought a parade and could do it again, if oil stays up. The Jays and Giants could be next. Every one of these teams is owned by someone rich enough to buy a mid-sized country, but they act like they’re running a Quiznos. If the Dodgers are the only ones playing at scale, that’s not on them. That’s on a league filled with timid billionaires more interested in EBITDA than ERA.
Baseball’s economy works when rivalries mean something and when teams chase each other’s brilliance instead of whining about payroll disparity. The Dodgers are proof that you can spend, win, and profit, all at once. They’ve made the luxury tax irrelevant by outperforming it, year after year, and laughing all the way to the postseason.
If that makes people mad, good. Maybe that anger will finally light a fire under the rest of the league. Baseball doesn’t need less of what the Dodgers are doing. It needs more. More investment. More teams trying to build dynasties instead of balance sheets.
The Dodgers didn’t break the system. They mastered it. Until someone else grows the guts and the smarts to challenge them, they’re going to keep winning, keep spending, and keep proving that the only real cap in baseball is imagination.
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There are two devices that got a lot of notice during the World Series and with all the questions and comments, I wanted to explain now that I know exactly which ones were used. Several Blue Jays pitchers were seen between innings with a wrap on their shoulder. That was a Hyperice X Shoulder, but it’s not cold, but heat that helps keep the shoulder warm and loose between innings. The device is commercially available and while research is mixed, several teams are using them, largely based on player preference.
The other is the brace that Shohei Ohtani wears while pitching. There’s a small “bump” visible just below his jersey sleeve that’s the tell and I got one source to confirm it. It’s a Bauerfeind Sports Elbow Brace, which has a BOA fitting dial in precisely the spot where the bump is seen on Ohtani’s game days. While the brace doesn’t appear to be sold currently, it was endorsed by a number of people and Ohtani wouldn’t be the only one to use it, but one of few in game. It’s more widely used in rehabs, or was. The similar Kinetic Arm, which I’ve detailed here before, has far more research behind it and there’s been some suspicion Ohtani uses one as well.
This World Series was a highlight reel for medical tech, from those two to the hand-made knee pad for George Springer and the small knee brace/sleeve that Bo Bichette wore during games he played in the field. Given all the hit by pitches, more should be like Shohei Ohtani, who wears a custom New Balance pad over his batting glove and a shin guard that wraps nearly all the way around his front leg.
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Yu Darvish announced that he had his flexor tendon repaired and also said he had an internal brace overlaid on his UCL. It’s interesting wording, implying the UCL was damaged but intact, but omitting any mention that it was repaired. There’s possibility that it wasn’t - the biological part of anything is something unnecessary, though doctors still don’t understand all the biological connections of an intact ligament or tendon.
For most, Darvish will miss the season and at age-39, whether he comes back at all is something of a question. He wouldn’t have had this surgery if he didn’t intend to come back, especially as involved as it was for Dr. Keith Meister. For the Padres, they’ll have Joe Musgrove back (or should) after missing a season to similar surgery, but the gain is only marginal.
Darvish’s career is an interesting case for the voters. While Ichiro Suzuki was a near-unanimous pick, as he should have been, it’s injuries and missed time that keep his career from the “definitely in” to the “maybe.” He was very good very quickly and when healthy, has kept that up. He missed a ring with the Rangers, had a nice run with the Cubs, and is a mainstay for the Seidler-era Padres, but I’m not sure that’s enough. 33 WAR, 115 wins, and a surprising lack of black ink don’t measure up. Those are basically Jose Rijo’s numbers and post-career issues aside, Rijo never got close.
While I do think Darvish will come back in ‘27, I’m curious to see if the Padres move to run out his contract, which runs through ‘28 (age-42). The Padres are expected to pare their payroll at some point, especially if the reality of their ownership situation gets sorted. The broader Seidler family isn’t losing money, but they pushed the payroll for the chance to win and missed despite going for it again this season. I guess it’s hard to plan for what AJ Preller might do.