Twenty-eight days later, the Dodgers have packed up and left Camelback Ranch to embark on their World Series championship defense.
Their first stop: Japan, with the team flying out Wednesday ahead of its season-opening two-game series against the Chicago Cubs next week at the Tokyo Dome.
Because of that schedule quirk, the Dodgers’ spring schedule was abbreviated again. But even in just four weeks, much emerged about the state of the team.
As the club prepares to begin the season, here are five takeaways on how things went in camp.
Read more: Hyeseong Kim, Bobby Miller optioned as Dodgers reassign players to minor league camp
Shohei Ohtani’s focus on DH (for now)
If there was one big surprise, it was the Dodgers’ decision to have Shohei Ohtani “slow-play” his pitching program over the second half of camp and focus — at least at the start of the season — on solely being a designated hitter.
Eventually, the Dodgers maintain, Ohtani will return to pitching this year, after being unable to last season while recovering from a second Tommy John surgery.
But, both manager Dave Roberts and pitching coach Mark Prior explained, Ohtani and the club made a collaborative choice to wait on fully building him up on the mound, halting his bullpen sessions once he began DHing in Cactus League games.
Barring an undisclosed physical issue — something Roberts and Prior repeatedly insisted was not the case — it means that Ohtani is willingly delaying his return to two-way duties, if only temporarily, in order to focus on hitting.
“There’s a little bit of a shift towards making sure he’s dialed in, ready to go from a DH standpoint,” Prior said last week. “I think this was a good time to just kind of like de-load and make sure he’s geared up, ready to go, and then continue to throw and then gear up once we get back.”
The move makes sense for Ohtani and the team. The Dodgers never were going to need 20-plus starts out of Ohtani. In fact the more he pitches, the more complicated handling him will be, potentially necessitating extra days off that would keep his bat out of the lineup.
What the Dodgers really want is to have Ohtani as an option come the stretch run of the season — assuming he rediscovers some semblance of the stuff that helped him post a 2.84 earned-run average as a pitcher from 2021 to 2023….