John McLellan is not old enough to have a driver’s license at 13 years old, but the Redondo Beach teenager has been racing kart cars at speeds nearing 80 mph in Italy this month.
Last week, he had a breakthrough performance, finishing third among 117 drivers representing 33 countries at the FIA Karting World Cup OK-N Junior Final at Leopard Circuit Viterbo, Italy.
His father, John Sr., sent him to Italy for four weeks to compete for Sweden-based Ward Racing.
“Dad is on him all the time,” his father said. “Do your homework, brush your teeth.”
“Yes and yes,” John Jr. said this week after returning home.
John Jr. is enrolled in a Texas-based online middle school to help with his unpredictable traveling schedule. He had been a club soccer player until deciding racing is what he wants to do.
First he was into motocross at age 6. After an accident resulting in a broken hand and broken collarbone, kart racing became his specialty, with a dream of racing Formula 1 cars.
John McLellan, 13, in his Kart car.
(Matteo Segago)
His mother is from Australia and his father is a Torrance native who chose racing motorcycles over playing high school soccer. Like father, like son.
“He loves it,” John Sr. said. “What kid wouldn’t want to race cars?”
John said of the strangeness driving high speeds at 13: “Whenever you have a kid going 80 mph without a driver’s license and going to middle school, you would think that’s absolute carnage and crazy. Karting is just a very competitive sport.”
The average lap speeds are 56 mph. John wants to attend a regular high school when he enters ninth grade next year, so whether it’s Rolling Hills Prep or Redondo Union, new friends need to know they’re hanging out with a teenager who, as Tom Cruise said in “Top Gun,” “I feel the need … the need for speed.”
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.
The Dodgers never waver in their game plan for the regular season: win enough games to secure a bye in the opening round of the playoffs and, in so doing, afford players all the down time they need during the summer to be in top form come fall. They do not need to hurry anyone off the injured list so they can squeak out another National League West title.
Unfortunately for the Dodgers and their increasingly perilous hope of a three-peat, they did not follow that game plan with Shohei Ohtani. The Dodgers failed Ohtani this summer, and now all that remains is for them to cross their collective fingers and hope for the best.
Hope, as they say, is not a strategy.
The Dodgers should drop Ohtani from the postseason roster.
Amid headlines about how the Dodgers might have benched Ohtani for Game 3 of the NL Championship Series, manager Dave Roberts said the thinking was more about coupling Tuesday’s day off with a second consecutive day of rest.
“It was never a benching,” Roberts said.
Roberts drew a parallel between what might have happened with Ohtani and what did happen with Freddie Freeman during the NLCS two years ago, when the Dodgers provided what the manager called a “reset” — a day off for the team, followed by a rest day for Freeman.
“And he ends up winning the MVP in the World Series,” Roberts said.
Freeman had been playing with a bad ankle for three weeks, and even then he had been more productive that October than Ohtani has been in this one. Ohtani has been playing with a bad knee and biceps for three months, and the Dodgers already have tried intermittent rest.
They tried that in September, twice. They touted their bye week before the start of the playoffs. They talked up their three days off before the start of the NLCS.
They went 0 for 4. Enough already.
Roberts said the Dodgers — not just Ohtani, but the coaching staff and the training staff — see progress. True, no doubt. But we’ve heard similarly encouraging words after each of Ohtani’s rest breaks.
“We’re listening to Shohei, and we’re going to support the crap out of him and believe in him,” Roberts said, “and that’s it.”
Ohtani said Tuesday that his symptoms have subsided since the Dodgers put him on the injured list, for the minimum stay. That was a month ago.
Shohei Ohtani is just three for 20 this postseason.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
On Tuesday, he said his approaches can alternate between “focusing on reducing the symptoms and getting rid of the pain and/or just making sure that I’m moving well in the swing.”
There is no evidence so far that this might work, and an uncomfortable and increasing body of evidence that it might not.
Ohtani is batting .150 in the playoffs, with three hits in 20 at-bats. Of the 39 players with at least 20 at-bats this postseason entering play Tuesday, only three have a lower OPS than Ohtani’s .411.
One of them, Dodgers catcher Will Smith, has one hit in 23 at-bats. But he is hitting the ball hard: in the NLCS, one ball hit at 102 mph, another at 101, and every ball hit harder than the one Ohtani hit the hardest.
That exit velocity: 86 mph.
He has not pulled a ball in the series for a hit, or for an out.
Over his major league career, he has homered once every 14 at-bats.
He has not hit a home run since Aug. 18, a span of 107 at-bats. He has driven in one run since then; the Dodgers batted him cleanup in Game 2.
And, since hitting that last home run, Ohtani is batting .036 against fastballs thrown 95 mph or harder. The average fastball in this postseason: 96.2 mph, according to analyst Mike Petriello’s close-up of all the different ways Ohtani’s swing is fouled up.
When Ohtani spoke with reporters before the playoffs started, he said he might not know the full extent of his injuries or what he might need to do to rehabilitate them until after the postseason.
“I haven’t been able to get a good grasp of the root cause of all this,” he said then. “I think that process is going to happen during the offseason, when I’m going to have a little bit more time to be able to address it. But as of now, it’s something I’m just going to have to manage.”
The Dodgers did not need Ohtani to win the NL West. They needed to shut him down for an extended period to maximize their chances of winning in October.
They failed to do that. They believed a few days of rest would allow them to nurse Ohtani through the rest of the season.
