LA Times columnist jumps the gun by calling out Dodgers' future playoff performance

Back in March, when the Shohei Ohtani-Ippei Mizuhara betting scandal had just come to light and so many questions needed answering, baseball writers were quick to jump on Ohtani, questioning his involvement and even his maturity after his camp insisted that he'd been tricked, lied to, and stolen from by Mizuhara. There were ways to cast doubt upon Ohtani, but the way that many of them went about it devolved into strange, condescending, infantilizing screeds.

One notable example came from Los Angeles Times writer Dylan Hernández, who insisted that Ohtani needed to grow up in order to become a better baseball player. As things turned out, Ohtani didn't let the scandal impact his performance on the field much at all. Aside from some hitting with RISP problems that continue to plague the Dodgers as a whole, Ohtani still hit .333 with a 1.012 from the first game of the Seoul Series to April 10, the day before the extent of Mizuhara's theft was revealed by prosecutors.

Ohtani has seemingly been exonerated (and Mizuhara faces up to 33 years in prison), but there's been nary a peep from Hernández on that front. Instead, he's back to making presumptive, way-too-early calls with the Dodgers just a third of the way through the season. In a recent column, Hernández basically called their almost inevitable postseason run dead in the water.

LA Times writer Dylan Hernández is already bringing a fatalistic eye to Dodgers' postseason at the beginning of June

After acknowleding that the Dodgers were winning but insisting they didn't look like a playoff team, Hernández cited a few problems that have affected them so far this season: the bottom of the lineup isn't hitting well, and the rotation has improved but pitchers are still getting an extra day or two between starts.

Sure, the lineup is top heavy — that's a fact that no one can dispute — and injury-prone Tyler Glasnow and James Paxton are getting more time between starts, as is Yoshinobu Yamamoto, in order to mimic the one-start-a-week model he was used to in NPB. However, the Dodgers are likely to be six starters full well before the postseason, when Clayton Kershaw and Bobby Miller return, and if Gavin Stone gets the push back to the bullpen, he'd be the perfect long reliever or a prime candidate as a de facto seventh starter if necessary.

And isn't it a little hard to predict playoff success for anyone with the expanded playoff format? The Diamondbacks only won 84 games and the Rangers only won 90, but they were our World Series contenders.

All of this is to say that we're still not halfway into the season, problems can right themselves, and while a dose of realism is healthy, it doesn't make much sense to be having these conversations in June.