Three hits, a grand slam, nearly the cycle. Shohei Ohtani opened the 2026 WBC against Chinese Taipei looking like the best hitter on the planet, which he probably is. Meanwhile, somewhere in Los Angeles, a faction of Dodgers fans watched that swing and winced, imagining a rolled ankle on first base or a jammed wrist on a checked swing. Their $700 million investment playing exhibition ball in Tokyo.

I get the anxiety. I just think it's wildly mispriced.

The Díaz Precedent Is Doing Too Much Work

Every argument against Ohtani's WBC participation leads back to Edwin Díaz. The Mets closer blew out his knee celebrating Puerto Rico's 2023 semifinal win and missed the entire season. It was ugly. It was also a freak injury during a celebration, not during gameplay, and Díaz is a pitcher who plants and explodes off a mound. Ohtani is hitting. Just hitting. The Dodgers restricted him to DH only, which strips out the two highest-risk baseball activities: pitching and fielding.

Yes, a DH can still get hurt. He could foul a ball off his foot. He could pull a hamstring running the bases. He could also do any of those things during spring training, which is literally what he'd be doing otherwise. The marginal injury risk of WBC at-bats over Cactus League at-bats is tiny. You are not saving Ohtani by keeping him in Arizona. You are just making him bored.

The Dodgers Played This Perfectly

Look at what the organization actually did. They let Ohtani hit. They let Yamamoto pitch, capped at three innings and 65 pitches in the first round. They did not let Roki Sasaki go. That's a tiered risk assessment, not a blank check. The Dodgers treated this like portfolio management: allocate where the risk-reward makes sense, pull back where it doesn't.

The reward matters. Ohtani told reporters on March 4 that his condition is "close to 100%." A motivated, locked-in Ohtani getting meaningful at-bats against elite international pitching is better spring training than facing a 24-year-old trying to make the roster out of minor league camp. Competitive reps have value. Sharp money knows this.

I'll grant the skeptics one thing: losing five players during spring training does create real complications, especially for position battles and defensive chemistry with Hyeseong Kim gone. Baseball HQ flagged the Kim and Smith absences as potentially significant for exactly that reason. But Ohtani doesn't play defense anyway. His absence from Camelback Ranch costs the Dodgers nothing structurally.

The commercial angle is enormous, too, though that's MLB's problem more than the Dodgers'. A potential Japan vs. USA final with Ohtani and Judge could blow past the 4.5 million viewers FS1 pulled in 2023. That kind of exposure doesn't just sell tickets. It sells the sport. And Ohtani, who led his league in OPS for three consecutive years and invented the 50-50 club in 2024, is the product. You don't lock the product in a warehouse.

The deeper issue is philosophical. Teams that obsess over protecting players from every conceivable risk end up with a different problem: disengaged superstars. Ohtani is Japanese. The WBC is sacred in Japan. Telling him he can't represent his country would damage the relationship in ways that don't show up on an injury report but absolutely show up in October. Yamamoto said it plainly: "The Dodgers and the WBC, they both are very important to me equally." Listen to that sentence. It's not a ranking. It's a boundary.

If you're a Dodgers fan running a season-long futures bet, and you are freaking out about Ohtani taking DH at-bats in the WBC, you are hedging against the wrong risk. The real threats to the 2026 Dodgers are the things you can't control: a torn UCL in June, a dead arm in August, a bullpen collapse in the NLCS. Not a grand slam in Tokyo.

Ohtani hit four balls to the warning track before that slam cleared the fence. The bat is ready. Let it work.