The All-Star Game is at Citizens Bank Park on Tuesday. Shohei Ohtani, who received more fan votes than any other player in baseball — 3,341,257 of them — will not be there. His left knee hurts. The Dodgers say he’ll be fine. I believe they believe that. That’s what concerns me.
The timeline matters. Ohtani left a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on June 11 with knee discomfort. One full month before the team went public with an All-Star scratch. For four weeks, through road trips and pitching starts and home runs, the Dodgers managed what they were calling “continued irritation” before deciding the Midsummer Classic was too much to ask. One month. Managed quietly. Then announced.
The left knee is not a new variable. In September 2019, still with the Angels, Ohtani had surgery on that same knee for a bipartite patella, a condition where a fragment of kneecap fails to fuse properly. It can recur. The fragment can move, irritate, inflame. “Knee irritation,” as a medical descriptor, covers an enormous amount of territory from minor nuisance to something that sounds a lot more worrying once you know the surgical history.
Then there’s the language Dave Roberts reached for when asked about the decision: “I do think there’s a middle for what’s best for him, what potentially could be downside, but also what’s best for the game.” That sentence is doing the work of three people. Roberts is managing Ohtani’s health, managing the franchise, and managing the optics of pulling the most popular player in baseball from an event hosted at my ballpark. He’s fitting all of that into one careful, careful answer. That’s not evasion. That’s institutional communication at full volume.
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After the Dodgers-Diamondbacks series wraps, the knee gets drained and Ohtani likely receives an injection. No surgery. Routine maintenance, the team says. That’s probably accurate. Athletes have fluid pulled from joints all the time, and he hit a home run on the same day the injury was announced. Imaging came back clean. There are real, honest reasons to think this resolves without drama.
But the Dodgers paid $700 million for this man, and they cannot say they’re worried. Not because they’re being dishonest — because the incentive to understate runs straight through every word they say about his body. When the financial exposure is that goddamn large, even the most well-intentioned franchise starts choosing language with a precision that has nothing to do with medicine. So when the team says “irritation” and “he’ll be fine,” I’m not accusing them of lying. I’m noting that they cannot afford to say anything else, which means “he’ll be fine” stops being information and becomes something you tell yourself.
I live in Philadelphia. Citizens Bank Park is my stadium, and the All-Star Game should have had Ohtani’s two-way dominance on full display in it. Instead, he joins Aaron Judge, who’s missing the game with a fractured rib the Yankees spent six weeks calling a “bone bruise”. Two best players in baseball. Two teams running the reassurance machine at capacity. Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park, the Midsummer Classic goes on without either of them.
Yes, athletes manage knee fluid constantly. The procedure is routine and the imaging was clean. He’s still producing at an elite level with a career-best 1.79 ERA alongside everything he’s doing at the plate. Most of the time, this kind of thing is exactly what teams say it is.
The problem isn’t what they’re saying. The problem is what “irritation” is quietly covering: a knee that already had surgery once, on the same structure, with the same potential for recurrence, that was managed in silence for a month before anyone thought you needed to know. That’s a lot of weight for one word to carry.
