New Delhi, July 31 -- LOS ANGELES - Shohei Ohtani sat out Thursday's series finale against the Seattle Mariners with left knee soreness, and for the first time this season the Dodgers made the reason for his absence from the mound unmistakable.

"If it weren't for the knee," Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers' president of baseball operations, said Thursday, "he would be pitching right now."

That sentence reframed a month of careful language from Los Angeles, which had spent the weeks since the All-Star break describing Ohtani's mound timeline in the vague terms that organizations prefer when they do not want to commit to a date. Ohtani last pitched July 3. He received a lubricant injection in the knee during the All-Star break after skipping ...