Stan Kasten said the Dodgers won’t be sold.

On a completely unrelated note, general manager Brandon Gomes insisted that Shohei Ohtani didn’t stop hitting because of his injuries.

The two-way player is just “a victim of his own greatness,” Gomes said.

What a relief.

Silly me, here I was thinking the Dodgers were cooked because Ohtani was shaking his arm and hitting on one leg the other night.

Turned out my unrealistic expectations of Ohtani have the same psychedelic properties as magic mushrooms.

“We’re really hard on Shohei if he struggles for a little bit, and then it’s up in arms,” Gomes said. “I don’t think there’s anything overly concerning at this point.”

Whom should I believe, Andrew Friedman’s better-looking clone or my lying eyes?

Ohtani is six for his last 46.

He has homered only once in the last 21 games he’s played outside of Coors Field in high-altitude Denver.

The numbers are making me hallucinate, evidently.

Team officials described Ohtani as day-to-day and downplayed their worries about what he might look like in the playoffs.

“I’m very confident that we’ll see the guy we all expect to see,” manager Dave Roberts said.

Gomes said Ohtani might even pitch again this season.

Such a perception of reality would certainly be easier for the Dodgers to stomach than the alternate view, which is that they were negligent in how they managed Ohtani and failed to protect him from himself.

Gomes said the Dodgers always had the situation under control. His contention was that Ohtani didn’t offer any reasons to be alarmed until his four-strikeout game on Wednesday night. Once the team’s decision-makers saw that, Gomes said, they leaped into action and kept Ohtani out of the lineup the next day for the series finale against the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium.

Roberts said he informed Ohtani of the decision to give him a break over a text message, to which Ohtani responded with a saluting face emoji.

Gomes boasted of how well the Dodgers have communicated with Ohtani, implying their reluctance to sit him earlier had nothing to do with the unusual balance of power between the team and the international superstar responsible for generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues.

But if Ohtani was accepting of the Dodgers’ judgments as Gomes claimed, shouldn’t the team have taken a more proactive approach with him?

Gomes said the Dodgers did what they believed was best for Ohtani and the team at the time, and that was to continue playing him.

“I think any time you have Sho in the lineup, it’s going to be of benefit,” Gomes said.

I guess I was seeing things when I called for the Dodgers to place Ohtani on the injured list more than a month ago.

“There’s a difference between involving a star player in decisions about his playing time and allowing him to destroy his body, and the Dodgers are dangerously close to crossing that line,” I wrote at the time.

Strange how that’s what ended up happening.

Or how Ohtani now has a literal pain in the neck.

Or how his left hip is tight.

Or how he has obvious trouble braking when he sprints.

“I don’t think you can definitely say that any struggles have been because of how he’s feeling physically,” Gomes said.

Gomes better be right.

Because there’s a substantial difference in how the Dodgers’ offense looks when Ohtani is hitting and when he isn’t. One scenario offers the team’s star-studded pitching rotation a margin for error. The other requires the group to be close to perfect.

So which was it?

Did Gomes really believe the Dodgers could get Ohtani back on track without doing anything drastic? Or did Gomes know he was talking nonsense in an effort to distance himself from choices that could cost the Dodgers a three-peat?

The coming weeks will reveal the answer.

Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters