ATLANTA — As Major League Baseball breaks for Tuesday night’s annual All-Star Game, it’s already been a tumultuous season for a number of teams facing high expectations.
One thing that hasn’t changed coming into the break: Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani are still the headliners of the season. While their teams, the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, have been struggling recently, the superstars still have them at or near the top of their respective divisions.
The Yankees have straightened out after a six-game losing streak and remain only two games behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the AL East. They released veteran infielder D.J. LeMahieu this week, eating the final $22 million owed on his contract, and moved Jazz Chisholm Jr. back to second base from third.
Judge goes into Tuesday night’s game with a first half for the ages: 35 homers, 81 RBIs and a gaudy 1.195 OPS. His batting average has dropped from .402 on May 21 to .355, still handily leading the Major Leagues. The 6-foot-7, 282-pound Judge is on pace to break his AL record of 62 homers set in 2022. He hit his 350th career homer on Saturday, the fastest of any player in MLB history to do so, 182 games earlier than Mark McGwire.
“Please appreciate what you’re seeing with Judge,” Tony Clark, the executive director of the players’ union, said Saturday in an on-field interview prior to the annual Futures Game at Truist Park. “Hitters that size don’t do what he’s doing. Trying to keep all your moving pieces in the same place day in and day out is difficult enough, let alone when your levers are as large as his are.”
The Dodgers, meanwhile, had suddenly lost seven in a row through Friday and had watched their lead over the San Francisco Giants in the NL West shrink from eight games to four in a week before winning the final two games of the series. Perhaps it’s coincidence, but their tailspin has coincided with Ohtani’s return to pitching on June 16.
Since then, Ohtani’s batting average has dipped from .300 to .276 and his OPS from 1.039 to .987. His 32 homers have helped keep the Dodgers in first place, but he’s hit just three of them during the month of July.
Meanwhile, he’s made five starts as a pitcher and thrown a total of nine innings, his max of three innings on Saturday when he allowed a hit, a walk, struck out four Giants, and tossed 36 pitches. Bringing him back to the mound after his second reconstructive right elbow surgery for the first time since Aug. 23, 2023, has turned Ohtani from one of the most prolific hitters in the game to a short-shift pitcher and, for now, a mediocre batter.
Clark thinks it will be a short-term issue, once Ohtani gets used to preparing to pitch every five days while still hitting in the top spot every day.
“He comes off the mound and has to immediately get ready to hit, to lead off,” Clark said, noting the problem is particularly acute at Dodger Stadium. “I’ve never seen that before.”
No one has. Clark said he expects Ohtani to figure it out. “Of all my worries in baseball, Ohtani’s not one of them,” he said.
Try this one: Hitting is down overall in MLB, with a .245 average, three points lower than 2023, when new rules were invoked to speed up the game and eliminate defensive shifts.
The drought has been particularly felt in the NL, which boasts right now only one .300 hitter—Dodgers catcher Will Smith at .323. Freddie Freeman has plummeted from .374 on May 31 to .297. Mookie Betts has never gotten it going offensively this season and is hitting .244, 47 points below his lifetime mark of .291. Is this what his relocation from right field to shortstop has wrought?
Players and franchises have been moved from once comfortable positions with the abandon this season. The Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays have played in minor league ballparks this season with all the accompanying financial and aesthetic problems.
The teams are the lowest drawing in MLB, with the Rays averaging 9,852 and A’s 9,799 at parks that seat 11,000 (Steinbrenner Field), and 14,000 (Sutter Health Park), respectively.
The A’s are one of six teams in either league at this point with no shot at making the playoffs. The Rays held their own until playing 16 of their last 19 games on the road prior to the break. They were a half a game out on June 28 and are now 5.5 games back after losing 10 of their last 14.
How this all has skewed the playoff races is still a matter to be determined, Clark said.
“I’d like to be able to wait until all the games are played and then take the numbers and look at them,” he said.
And that leaves us with the All-Star host Braves, who because of injuries and other issues, are among the teams playing way below expectations. They opened 5-13 and have yet to be able to straighten it out. They’re still 11 games under .500 at the break, 12.5 games behind the Philadelphia Phillies in the NL East and 9.5 games in arrears of the third NL Wild Card spot with eight teams ahead of them. This, despite having the 10th-highest payroll in the league at $232 million.
“We’re just going up and down like a roller coaster,” Marquis Grissom, the former Braves centerfielder and manager of the American League in the Saturday’s Futures Game, said of the Braves. “We get going one minute, the next minute, we don’t.”
The disappointment is palpable in a team that won the World Series as recently as four years ago and has veteran skipper Brian Snitker, in the last year of his contract, looking toward retirement.
“I’ll never say never, because I always felt if I had a say-so, coming down the stretch, that we were going to have a chance,” Hall of Famer Chipper Jones, who managed the National League in the 2025 MLB All-Star Futures Game on Saturday, said. “I’d agree it’s going to be tough. Obviously.”
But while the All-Star break is always a time to take stock of the present, it’s also a chance to look ahead, which is what Grissom was doing in Atlanta. His son, Marquis Grissom Jr., played for the National League futures team. This is just another example of how the game continues to pass from generation to generation, a la Fernando Tatis to San Diego Padres star Fernando Tatis Jr., the latter having had two hits in the 2018 Futures Game, and ex-Braves star Andruw Jones to Druw Jones, an Arizona Diamondbacks product who knocked in a run in last year’s Futures contest.
“With the coaches I have like my father, I’m still old-school, doing hard work,” Grissom Jr., a Triple-A pitcher in the Washington Nationals organization, said. “I still try to learn analytics and do certain things. But the game ain’t changed. I’m still trying to play the same game.”
The All-Star Game itself will offer two of its top kids as starters: Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates representing the NL for the second year in a row, and Tarik Skubal of the Detroit Tigers opening for the AL.
Perhaps in a sign of the times, Ohtani will not pitch, but he’ll start at DH, his Dodgers manager and the NL manager Dave Roberts said Sunday.
