LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani’s days as a two-way player might have an expiration date. But the Dodgers agree with the four-time league MVP — that date hasn’t arrived yet.

“I fully expect him to pitch next year,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said on Wednesday.

“And I’m not only expecting him to pitch — we’re excited about him pitching. So now it’s about how do we do that? How do we manage through a long season and have him at his best going into October? That’s a challenge. And we have to figure that out together, and I’m confident that we will continue to learn from things as we go and continue to make it better.”

It was not a challenge Ohtani and the Dodgers were able to meet in 2026. Ohtani threw his last pitch on July 3 and the knee and biceps injuries that curtailed his pitching also impacted his hitting. His batting average (.275), on-base percentage (.377) and OPS (.889) were his lowest since his 2022 season with the Angels. His 30 home runs were his fewest in a full season since 2019 and he went a career-long 25 games without a home run before his three-run shot in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series against the Milwaukee Brewers.

Friedman said on Wednesday that Ohtani is not expected to require surgery this offseason to address the injuries — “just rest.”

“He’s had a lot of different things going on,” Friedman acknowledged. “Knee was bothering him off and on. It was just a little bit of an unfortunate game of whack-a-mole. The knee got to a better spot, and then just kind of the bicep area was bothering him. Just a number of different things. Some of it that would calm down for some period, some that would get re-irritated. It was just a lot of different things he was trying to contend with at once.”

Friedman said he expects Ohtani to be at full strength when the team reports for spring training next year — whenever that might be.

Ohtani will enter 2027 at age 32 and this year’s injuries might be an indication he cannot take on a two-way workload for a full season and the team will have to put on some significant limitations. Friedman indicated that is something the team has not decided yet.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Friedman said.

“We’ll have to figure that out. We talked about this a lot. This is unprecedented what he’s doing. So obviously for us it’s unprecedented. We don’t have any experience to draw from. We can’t go look at how other situations have played out to try to learn from the good and the bad. We have to all just figure it out together.”

Even with Tarik Skubal headed to free agency, the Dodgers have starting pitching depth. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Roki Sasaki all return with Justin Wrobleski, Emmet Sheehan and Gavin Stone behind them. That could allow the Dodgers to be creative in limiting Ohtani’s time on the mound, preserving him for October and protecting his offensive contributions by delaying the start to his season as a pitcher, spacing out his starts or giving him more days off.

“We haven’t gotten into details yet,” Friedman said. “But I expect us to throw our heads together and figure out both in the batter’s box, on the mound, just how we marry all that together to have him impact us as much as he can during the regular season and then also be in a really good spot going into October. And so that’s what we’re going to try to figure out together.”

Managing Ohtani’s workload is only one thing Friedman and the Dodgers have to figure out on the heels of their four-game dismissal in the NLCS.

The Dodgers ended each of the past two years with the oldest position player group in MLB (by average age) and the younger, hungrier Milwaukee Brewers seemed to expose that.

“This isn’t something that we just woke up and were like, ‘Oh wow, the age of our position player group.’ We knew what things were going to look like in ’26, ’27, but also how talented these guys are, the way they prepare,” Friedman said.

In the past, Friedman has talked about the danger of big-market teams loaded with veteran players on high salaries “falling off the cliff” at some point. He does not see that cliff coming for the Dodgers any time soon thanks to a productive farm system.

“I think in a lot of ways it’s because you have an aging roster, and you have traded away prospects in your farm system to where you’re in the bottom 10 of farm system rankings,” he said of the trap other teams have fallen into. “That is why we have poured so much energy and focus into our farm system, because so much of avoiding that is having a talented wave of players who can come up and supplement around your core group of guys.

“We couldn’t feel more bullish on the position player core group that we have from A-ball through Triple-A that are coming. Obviously we’ve traded away a lot of really talented players also. So for us to be in that position, I think speaks to the incredible work of our baseball operations group with our scouting and player development and our baseball ops group of everyone working so well together. That is why it was such an important factor for us to not fall prey to the same thing that we’ve seen from a lot of large-revenue teams in the past, and we feel really good about our future outlook, and so now there’s an art to how to integrate and the timing of that and how to do it that we’ll spend a lot of time on.”

Josue De Paula is the most highly-regarded prospect in that wave of talent and the most likely to force his way onto the 2027 roster. He made his major league debut in September and was on the postseason roster for both series. But it’s clear he needs to improve defensively in order to become a viable option as an everyday player.

“We’ve talked through it, and he’s fully aware of continuing to improve defensively,” general manager Brandon Gomes said. “We’ve all seen what he’s capable of in the box, which is incredibly exciting. … We’re not looking just to be like, ‘Oh, DePo got pretty good (defensively).’ I think his mindset and our coaching staff and all of us is to make him as good of a defensive outfielder as he can to be a full player because that’s what we expect of all of our guys that step on the field.”

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