After hitting the first of his two home runs on Tuesday, Shohei Ohtani fast-forwarded through the festivities. On most days, he would have indulged in the Los Angeles Angels’ post-dinger ritual, sporting the samurai helmet he purchased in April, walking the length of the bench, and accepting back and butt slaps from a gauntlet of grinning teammates. This time, for efficiency’s sake, he sidestepped the celebratory tradition, declining the heavy helmet, descending the dugout steps, and air-fiving everyone at once. Then he removed his batting helmet, reinstated his cap, and prepared to pitch. There was one out already; two more, and he’d have to return to the mound.
Ohtani did don the kabuto later in the game, when he homered in a more leisurely late inning after his work on defense was done. That shot chased the Chicago White Sox, whom Ohtani almost single-handedly beat by going 3-for-3 with a walk and also striking out 10 over 6 1/3 innings of one-run ball. (The one run charged to Ohtani in the Angels’ 4-2 win was allowed by reliever Jacob Webb after Ohtani departed with a cracked fingernail.) I say almost single-handedly only because he used both of his hands, throwing from the right side and swinging from the left. It was the latest, and likely greatest (so far) in a series of signature two-way games—the first time he’s gone deep twice on a two-way day. He wasn’t just the most valuable hitter and pitcher in that game; on a night when every MLB team was in action, no player amassed more WAR than him as a hitter or pitcher. When Ohtani turns incandescent, the setting, the stakes, and the efforts of his teammates are secondary. The two-way legend alone is enough to turn a Tuesday game in June against the fourth-place White Sox into appointment TV.
After the game, Angels sideline reporter Erica Weston asked the ace-slugger (through his interpreter) how he felt about his pitching performance. As the home fans who’d stayed in the stands chanted “M-V-P,” Ohtani considered the question. “I wish I could have finished that seventh inning,” he said.
Ohtani may not have the time or inclination to publicly savor his success, but nothing is stopping the rest of us. At one point on Tuesday night, Major League Baseball’s official Twitter account published nine consecutive tweets or retweets about Ohtani—and that wasn’t counting the two that followed his first Sho-mer earlier in the evening. When we put this season on the shelf, it will be bookended by two Ohtani feats: striking out Mike Trout to win the World Baseball Classic, and signing with some lucky, deep-pocketed club for $600 million or more. But between those bookends will be a very rich text.
Ohtani, who’ll turn 29 next week, is having a career year, which is saying something considering he’s coming off a unanimous MVP campaign in 2021 and a superior sequel that was relegated to runner-up placement by Aaron Judge’s Maris-surpassing season. At the plate, Ohtani is slashing .304/.386/.654 with a major-league-leading 28 homers, 1.039 OPS, and 180 wRC+. As a pitcher, he’s posted a 3.02 ERA with the majors’ third-most strikeouts and lowest batting average allowed (minimum 60 innings). Incredibly, he’s tied for the American League lead in games played and tied for 15th in the majors in innings pitched. In each of the past two seasons, I goggled at his combined totals of plate appearances and batters faced; last year he compiled 1,326, the most since Steve Carlton in 1980. This year, he’s on pace for 1,476, which would be the most since Phil Niekro in 1979. And just because he can, he’s also swiped 11 bases.
Although Ohtani fun facts abound, most don’t depend on Babe Ruth anymore. Ruth didn’t last as a true two-way player for long. In that sense, Ohtani has long since left the Babe behind. With apologies to Ruth and Bullet Rogan, Ohtani is creating his own clubs, clearing his own paths: He’s on pace for 56 homers and 254 strikeouts this season, either one of which would make for a monster season. In making a beeline for both, he’s not only distinguishing himself from the pre-integration ghosts, but lapping his living competitors. After Tuesday’s all-around flex, which was worth nearly 1 WAR, according to FanGraphs—close to the realistic single-game limit—Ohtani leads the second-place AL players (Wander Franco and Kevin Gausman) by 2.2. At this stage of the season, that’s an enormous margin.
Through Monday, 1,189 of this season’s 2,430 games had been played. That’s 49 percent of the regular-season schedule. (The 44-37 Angels, who have a roughly 50-50 chance to make the playoffs thanks in large part to Ohtani, sit precisely at their halfway point.) WAR is tricky to research on a game-to-game level—it’s not really designed to work that way—but FanGraphs does make it possible to search for WAR produced over precise time spans since 2002, so I looked up the point in every season since 2002 (excluding 2020) that was closest to the current 49 percent mark. Then I graphed the gaps in each league between the WAR leaders and their closest competitors through those dates. (Years with no visible bars indicate ties at the top of the leaderboard.)
That bar on the bottom is bigger than any of the others. Ohtani’s AL WAR lead is larger than the leads of peak-PED Barry Bonds (post-2001, anyway), or early-PED A-Rod, or Albert Pujols in his prime, or 2016 Clayton Kershaw, or 2019 Trout. That’s a quintet of all-time greats, none of whom had separated himself from the intra-league pack as securely as Ohtani through the 49 percent point.
The second-place WAR earner in either league, Ronald Acuña Jr., is also having himself a fantastic 2023: He’s just off the pace for a 40-70 season. (He homered twice on Tuesday too.) Yet Ohtani leads him by 1.4 WAR, which is also the biggest post-2001 gap between MLB’s no. 1 and no. 2 WARlords at this juncture.
Not only has Ohtani’s 2023 been better than his 2022, which was better than his 2021, which was better than his 2018—each of which was mind-blowing!—but he has no real rival in the WAR race thus far. Aaron Judge and Yordan Alvarez are hurt. Trout is having his worst season, even though it would be the best for most players. (Until Ohtani showed up, I thought Trout was the best player ever, and now I neglect him like Andy did Woody when Buzz Lightyear arrived.) Great as José Ramírez is, he often finishes seasons with a WAR in the range of Ohtani’s today. It seems unlikely that anyone could catch up to a healthy Ohtani over the next three months. Granted, the highest WAR doesn’t always win the day at the BBWAA ballot box—writers don’t, and shouldn’t, vote straight ticket based on sorting a leaderboard—but Ohtani has the narrative-driven and old-school-stat-based races sort of sewn up too.
“I’ve never seen an MVP award solidified in June,” Angels play-by-play guy Wayne Randazzo said on Tuesday, after a presumably tired Ohtani, cracked fingernail and all, flicked a down-and-away pitch 400-plus feet out to the opposite field. “There’s no way anybody [else] can win the MVP this year in the American League.” An Angels broadcaster is hardly an unbiased source, but Randazzo is right: The award is Ohtani’s to lose, and an injury is starting to seem like the only thing that could stop him.
Heck, I could have tipped the scales further in Ohtani’s favor by using a different flavor of WAR: The Baseball-Reference brand has him at 6.1 WAR (1.5 clear of Acuña, and 2.1 past Franco) to FanGraphs’ 5.7. I thought I was being bold when I predicted before the season started that Ohtani would have the first post-integration 12-fWAR season by someone other than Bonds, but that’s looking less far-fetched now. (Even Bonds never got to 12 WAR by Baseball-Reference’s accounting, though a few others did.)
Of course, “on pace for” is much different from “destined to finish with.” There’s plenty of time to regress. The scary thing, though (or the exciting thing, depending on your perspective), is that Ohtani hasn’t yet been at his best on both sides of the ball. Even in the years since he signed with the Angels, perceptions of Ohtani’s relative talents as a hitter and pitcher have flip-flopped a few times. Before his first season, the consensus seemed to be that his arm would be better than his bat. Then he hit well and hurt his arm, which changed the calculus. Last year, though, Ohtani was arguably baseball’s most valuable pitcher, while his hitting took a small step back.
Ohtani entered this year as a popular Cy Young pick as well as the MVP favorite, but he’s accumulated twice as much fWAR in the batter’s box as he has with his arm. He’s also rectified any issues he may have had with hitting on his mound days.
Ohtani’s Pitching/Non-Pitching Offensive Splits
Ohtani strangely struggles with his two-strike approach: Since 2021, only Aaron Judge has hit better with no strikes or one strike, but whereas Judge still rakes with two strikes, Ohtani’s output plummets to Adam Frazier’s level, one of the steepest relative declines of any hitter. (Swing away, Shohei!) All told, though, he’s been the best at bat we’ve ever seen him—aided, maybe, by the ban on infield overshifts, which had held him back a bit before.
On the mound, however, he’s been wild: He’s leading the majors in hit by pitches and wild pitches, and he’s found the zone less frequently and walked men more frequently than he had since his rookie season. He also fell a little too in love with his sweeper, a stellar pitch that nonetheless left him susceptible to left-handed hitters, thanks to its sizable platoon split. Recently, he’s cut back on his sweeper usage, both overall and to lefties, and his less predictable pitch mix, coupled with unspecified mechanical adjustments, seems to have served him well. If his performance in his past three starts—four walks, 25 strikeouts, and one long ball allowed in 19 1/3 innings—is a sign that he has his mound mojo back (and his fingernail cooperates), improved pitching could compensate for any slumps at the plate. Or (dare to dream!) propel his production to even more absurd heights.
“Somehow it still surprises you every time,” Angels catcher Chad Wallach said about Ohtani’s Tuesday clinic. I’m dazzled and delighted, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Ohtani has ascended to a plane where assessing his chances of winning another MVP award seems like small beans: The question isn’t whether he’s the best player in his league this year, but whether he’s the best player ever. With each display like Tuesday’s, the answer seems more self-explanatory. We don’t know whether Ohtani can carry the Angels—who boast their best record at the midpoint of a season since 2014, and who’ve been proactive about plugging their holes—to October. Nor do we know where he’ll ply his two-way trade next year. (Unless the Angels go 0-for-July, he almost certainly won’t change teams until then.) When it comes to claiming the “Greatest of All Time” title, though, easy lies the head that wears a kabuto. Or opts not to, if he has to head back to the mound.
