No athlete has ever revved me up more than Shohei Ohtani, who arrived in the majors this spring after years of anticipation. When healthy, Ohtani had been both the best pitcher and the best hitter in Japan’s highest-level league at an unthinkably early age, and his decision to extend his two-way experiment stateside promised a spectacle unseen for a century. Amid the Christmas-comes-early reaction to reports that he’d signed with the Angels last December, the only negative note was the news that a leaked MRI in November had detected low-grade damage to his ulnar collateral ligament.
Although the Angels handled Ohtani like the underpaid prize he is, pitching him once a week even when he was believed to be healthy, further fraying of that ligament eventually suspended the experiment—first in June, and finally last week, when another MRI showed new damage that will likely lead to ligament replacement surgery after this season and limit Ohtani to DH duty in 2019. Now sidelined as a pitcher but uninhibited as a hitter, Ohtani is batting cleanup in the Angels lineup nearly every night, and his full-season stats are superb: a .295/.376/.593 slash line with 19 home runs in 304 plate appearances as a DH, and a 3.31 ERA with a 3.56 FIP and a 30 percent strikeout rate in 51 ⅔ innings as a starting pitcher.
On a rate basis, that’s a projection-surpassing performance, but thanks to his elbow issues and the Angels’ cautious handling of an almost unprecedented player, Ohtani has managed only half a hitter’s season and a quarter of a starter’s, where he’d hoped to have a full helping of both. Through Wednesday’s action, he was, by combined WAR (4.1), the game’s 50th-most valuable player, impressive for a part-timer but nowhere near the MVP we’d once pictured. WAR-wise, his debut season has been a bit of a letdown, but he’s succeeded in every sense except staying on the field. Lest we overlook the near-miracle we’ve witnessed, I present 10 ways in which Ohtani has fully lived up to his almost-impossible billing.
He won the AL Player of the Week Award after sustaining an injury that’s usually considered season-ending.
In the weeks before the final dire diagnosis came down, I was guilty of taking Ohtani for granted as he DH’d but didn’t pitch. I neglected his game logs, and I stopped tuning in via MLB.tv. Suddenly, he was one-way, and the wonderful world of limitless, rainbow baseball he’d brought us went back to being black and white. The Ohtani dream seemed dead.
When we learned last week that Ohtani would likely need surgery, ending the experiment until 2020, I lamented what we were losing and entered mourning mode. But as I tried to come to terms with losing two-way Ohtani, one-way Ohtani was there to ease the sting. On the night that the news came out—playing with an apparently irreparable UCL, not to mention the prospect of an impending grueling rehab process and a long layoff from pitching—Ohtani went 4-for-4 with two dingers, a walk, and a stolen base, as if to remind us that even half of Shohei Ohtani is more than most mortals. That ugly MRI would have ended any other player’s season, and here he was hitting homers, larger than life. This was the T-1000 reforming after Arnold said, “Hasta la vista.” The next night, he homered again—his third straight game going deep—and he’s been on base multiple times in four of the five games since, with two more steals and four more extra-base hits.
Days later, we learned that top-tier White Sox pitching prospect Michael Kopech would need to have Tommy John surgery, and the usual anger-grief-acceptance sequence started. As far as most fans are concerned, Kopech might as well have fallen off the face of the earth for all they’ll see him. He’ll have the surgery, his doctor will say it was a success, and the planet will circle the sun (and then some) before he’s back in a big league ballpark.
Anyone who thought Ohtani would settle for the typical Tommy John victim’s fate underestimated a player who’s made a career out of breaking baseball’s mold. Instead of shutting it down or even taking a day to consider his course, he kept playing and laid waste to the league with one working ligament. Much like the one-start, three-homer outburst in April when Ohtani was worth one WAR in one week and won his first Player of the Week award, his second award, which he received Monday, was another example of something only Ohtani could do—and the chance to see something new is why we were hyped in the first place. Speaking of which …
He’s been the fifth-best hitter in baseball.
Ohtani hit .125/.222/.125 in spring training, with 10 strikeouts and zero extra-base hits in 32 at-bats. Anonymous scouts cast doubt on his readiness, with one claiming that he looked “basically like a high school hitter.” Article after article (after article) explored the possibility that Ohtani would start the season in Triple-A. “Shohei Ohtani is Baseball’s Biggest Bust,” proclaimed a hot-take headline at a probably disreputable betting site that I hadn’t heard of before I found it while searching for an example of a not-really-representative but still satisfyingly silly-sounding article from March with which to end this paragraph.
OK, so maybe the fine folks at [alt+tabs back to strawman site] Sports Betting Dime weren’t capturing the consensus when they labeled Ohtani a bust, but his spring struggles were slightly concerning in light of the lack of post-1920 precedent for a true two-way player and the preexisting worries about whether Ohtani the hitter could hold his own. In retrospect, though, that fleeting touch of panic made it all the more fulfilling for fans when Ohtani demonstrated that he’s good enough not just to justify the two-way trial, but to excel at all aspects of it.
Thanks to his recent tear, Ohtani ranks fifth in wRC+ among all major league hitters with at least 200 plate appearances, trailing only a quartet of MVP candidates: Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, J.D. Martinez, and Alex Bregman. He’s tied for fifth in barrel rate, and his average exit velocity ranks in the 97th percentile. Those are fancy ways of saying that he hits the ball hard. He also places in the 78th percentile in sprint speed, another skill that sets him apart from his pitching brethren; of the 80 pitchers with at least five competitive runs tracked by Statcast this season, only four have been faster than the league average. Ohtani has the highest-ever OPS+ for a Japanese-born hitter, blowing away any offensive season by Hideki Matsui or Ichiro Suzuki by more than 20 points. He also has the most homers hit by a Japanese rookie and the highest OPS+ ever for a rookie DH.
The only thing he doesn’t have is a bigger sample of performance, although there’s nothing in the numbers that suggests he’s not a stud. The average hitter who qualified for the batting title last season finished with almost twice as many plate appearances as Ohtani has accrued this year, so if you want to see what Ohtani’s counting stats would look like over a full season of mashing at his 2018 rate, just double his current counts: approximately 40 homers, 40 doubles, and 20 stolen bases, all with a walk rate that’s comfortably above the league average. And that’s in a home ballpark that slightly suppresses all extra-base hits.
He’s done all that despite the DH penalty.
Sabermetric research has repeatedly shown that it’s significantly harder to hit as a DH than it is when playing the field, presumably because the DH has a harder time staying limber and/or mentally dialed into the game than a hitter who’s active on both sides of the ball. Most studies have put the penalty at about 15 points of weighted on-base average (wOBA), which would subtract almost a win’s worth of value over a full season. Some studies have hinted that the penalty is smaller for full-time DHs, either because they learn to adjust to the role or because the overall penalty is inflated by players who are DHing due to nagging injuries that might temporarily impair their performance, but it still appears to apply to full-timers to some extent. We may never see Ohtani hit in a non-DH capacity, but in a different role, his bat might be even better.
He’s hit as many home runs as every other pitcher combined.
Don’t talk to me about Triple Crowns. This is the only home run race that matters:
Shohei Ohtani: 304 plate appearances, 19 home runs
Every other pitcher plate appearance combined: 4,634 PA, 19 home runs
Ohtani, who hasn’t hit while listed as a pitcher this year, has a good chance to outdo the combined power output of every player who has. Pitchers as a group have produced a minus-26 wRC+ this season, their worst-ever performance in a very long line of weak ones. Ohtani’s offensive success flies in the face of a trend toward overmatched pitcher-hitters that spans three centuries and has only accelerated lately, making him more of an outlier in that respect than any player who preceded him.
He hit baseballs harder than anyone hit baseballs against him.
The hardest-hit ball Ohtani served up this season was a Jorge Soler ground-rule double on June 6, which was measured at 111.9 mph. Ohtani has hit six balls harder than that, and 15 in total harder than the second-hardest-hit ball he’s yielded on the mound. Only three other pitchers this season have hit a ball harder than their most booming batted ball allowed: fellow two-way threat Michael Lorenzen, Nationals starter Jefry Rodríguez, and, through his first three starts, Braves rookie Touki Toussaint.
He threw the fastest pitch by a starting pitcher this season.
Statcast says the called strike below that Ohtani threw to Astros outfielder Josh Reddick on April 24 left his hand traveling 101 mph, but park-corrected Pitch Info data, which accounts for calibration differences among Statcast systems, puts it at 101.9 mph. No other starter has matched the latter mark this season, and only Justin Verlander, Yordano Ventura, and Nathan Eovaldi have surpassed it in the previous 10 seasons. No wonder Ohtani did a 180 after letting it fly.
According to Pitch Info’s corrected data, Ohtani has thrown the four fastest pitches by a starter this season, each of which rounded up to 102 mph. No other starter has topped 101. Of course, Ohtani’s unparalleled pitch speeds may have contributed to his UCL tear, which would make his 2018 velocity title a Pyrrhic accomplishment. But radar readings like those still help explain why watching his season has felt like seeing Starman play sports.
He possessed the most unhittable pitch type of any starting pitcher this season.
When hitters swung at Ohtani’s splitter, they whiffed 55.8 percent of the time. That’s the highest whiff-per-swing rate against any pitch thrown more than 100 times by a starter this season.
Most Unhittable Pitch Types By Starters (Min. u003e100 Pitches)
Ohtani’s splitter is hard compared with the big league baseline, but it’s sufficiently slow to prey upon opponents who are geared up for his heat. It also gets good sink, and he throws it low, which is a recipe for making good hitters look bad and Alcides Escobar look even worse than usual. Below, I’ve made a montage of hitters (including Escobar) swinging through splitters from Ohtani that Pitch Info deems to have had a 0.0 percent chance of being called a strike.
He joined a bunch of Babe Ruth–only clubs.
For almost a century, Babe Ruth had the 50-10 club all to himself. That’s the ultra-exclusive establishment reserved for players with 50 innings pitched and 10 home runs hit in the same season, whose membership has now expanded to two. Ohtani is also the first player since Ruth in 1919 to throw 50 innings and hit 15 doubles, or to throw 50 innings and draw 25 walks, or to throw 50 innings and drive in (or score) more than 35 runs, or to throw 50 innings and make 200 plate appearances. He’s also the first player since George Sisler in 1915 to throw 50 innings and steal more than eight bases. You get where I’m going with this. Even Ohtani’s abbreviated rookie run was something no one had seen since before the Black Sox scandal, and it happened in a league that’s vastly more talented and specialized than the one Ruth revolutionized.
He changed the way we comprehend, present, and envision value.
Every extra click or scroll that it takes to see Ohtani’s stats is a reminder of the work that went into two-way-player proofing the web presence of a tradition-bound but data-driven sport. Ohtani was a Y2K bug for baseball stats sites: In preparation for his arrival, Baseball-Reference updated its pitching WAR so that pitchers who receive playing time as position players are now treated as part-time pitchers and part-time position players rather than full-time pitchers. FanGraphs added new ways to display batting stats for players who also pitch and updated its combined WAR leaderboard (which lists hitters and pitchers on the same page) to display total WAR instead of WAR at a player’s primary position. For the first time, Baseball Prospectus generated projections for one player as both a hitter and a pitcher, and the site also updated its Team Tracker fantasy tool to allow for adding Ohtani the hitter and Ohtani the pitcher as separate players. Fantasy leagues and video-game designers reckoned with Ohtani, too. In broadening the definition of a baseball player, he changed how we consume and understand the sport. He may also be making it easier for future two-way prospects to keep their positional options open.
He’s getting better.
Ohtani ranks 30th in park-adjusted deserved run average out of 117 starters with at least 50 innings pitched. That’s good—especially for a player in his age-23 season who’s also been one of baseball’s best hitters—but it could have been better had his health held up. In Ohtani’s third (and worst) start of the season, he was clearly hampered by a blister that led to his early removal, and he left both of his last two starts of the season (which were separated by almost two months) with symptoms that were likely caused by his UCL injury.
Not only did the elbow injury impair his performance at times when he was on the mound, but it also prevented him from continuing to implement the improvements he had made in May. As I wrote at the time, Ohtani had been close to a two-pitch pitcher in April, but in May—maybe because his blister had subsided, or maybe because he’d developed a feel for the different baseball used in MLB—he started throwing his sliders and curveballs with increasing frequency and heightened command. In four starts that month, Ohtani raised his strike rate relative to April, struck out 31 batters in 25 innings while walking only eight, and held opposing hitters to a .572 OPS. Maybe that wasn’t quite the “actual” Ohtani either, but he certainly looked more like the guy described in the breathless scouting reports.
As I also documented in that May article, Ohtani showed an ability to adapt at the plate, proving to teams that he could catch up to the inside heat that they kept pounding him with early on. And even as arm trouble has prevented him from pitching, Ohtani the hitter has managed to make more contact, chase fewer balls, and put together his hottest stretch yet. The saving grace of his probably pending surgery is that it should allow him to hit every day in 2019, rather than starting at DH three or four days a week and resting before and after his pitching appearances, which couldn’t have made the initial offensive adjustment to the majors any easier. Ohtani is so well-constructed that there’s redundancy built into his system: take half of him away and he might still be a star.
Even so, our first taste of two-way Ohtani left us hungry for more. And now his two-way timetable will have to be pushed back, and not necessarily just to 2020: Even if his arm is fully recovered by that Opening Day, he’ll be four years removed from his last season with more than 10 pitching appearances, and his workload may suffer some restrictions until 2021. Fortunately for all of us, he’ll be 26 when that season starts, still young enough to dominate not in spurts sandwiched around DL stints, but for full seasons. And based on what we’ve seen so far, we can trust that attaining two-way nirvana is not a matter of talent, but of opportunity and time.
All stats through Wednesday’s games. Thanks to Dan Hirsch of Baseball-Reference and Mike Petriello and Daren Willman of MLB Advanced Media for research assistance.
