Young Japanese hurler is wowing everyone
Ohtani can pitch 100 m.p.h. He can hit home runs. He might turn into a big star.
The baseball season has only just begun but we already have the biggest story of the year: Los Angeles Angels rookie phenom Shohei Ohtani, who has the potential to completely redefine the definition of MVP.
Ohtani has been worthy of the hype surrounding his arrival in Major League Baseball. The Japanese star, who works as both a starting pitcher and a hitter, ended his second week in the majors with a dominant start on Sunday against the Oakland A’s, carrying a perfect game into the seventh inning. He ultimately yielded one walk and one hit with 12 strikeouts. It was his second win in two starts, but that’s not doing his season justice.
Not are we not only witnessing history, we might also be recalibrating what it means to be the most valuable player in the league. Since 1931, the first year the award was voted on by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, 12 pitchers have won the award, with Clayton Kershaw (2014) the most recent recipient. But we’ve also never seen a player like Ohtani in modern times.
The value Ohtani presents as a player who contributes both as a pitcher and a hitter is simply dripping with potential if he can continue his early-season success.
Ohtani’s four-seam fastball is averaging 98.7 m.p.h. while topping out at 100 m.p.h., producing a swinging strike rate of 8 per cent, the sixth-highest this season. His split-finger fastball, meanwhile, has struck out 13 batters in 19 at-bats ending on the pitch. He’s allowed just one hit on the sweet spot of the bat — tied for the lowest among 104 pitchers with at least 150 pitches thrown in 2018 — and is the league leader in overall swinging strike rate (24 per cent). Only Patrick Corbin of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Gerrit Cole of the Houston Astros and Noah Syndergaard of the New York Mets have a larger differential between their strikeout and walk rates than Ohtani this season. Oh, by the way, Ohtani rakes, too. The 23-year-old also acts as the Angels designated hitter on off days and is batting .389 with three home runs in 19 plate appearances, producing runs at a rate that is almost triple the league average after adjusting for league and park effects (278 wRC+). And these aren’t just run-of-the-mill home runs — Ohtani hit one off Daniel Gossett at 112.4 m.p.h. that had a projected distance of 449 feet.
“It was loud,’’ Oakland shortstop Marcus Semien said of the hit. “The guys on their team talk about how far he hits the ball in BP (batting practice), his raw power. He showed it off there.’’
Ohtani is just the third player in baseball history to get two wins on the mound and hit three dingers in his team’s first 10 games. The last person to do it was starting pitcher Jim Shaw in 1919, but his three home runs in the Washington Senators’ first 10 games ended up being the only ones he hit all season.
Ohtani is also the third player to hit a home run in three consecutive games and also record a double-digit strikeout game in the same season. Ken Brett (1973) and Babe Ruth (1916) are the others. However, it took Ruth until the end of June to make the cut and Brett needed until the end of August. Ohtani has done it in the first 10 games of his major league career.
Ohtani has two starts and six games in the batter’s box this season, which projects to 97 games as a hitter and 32 starts as a pitcher. That equates to roughly 300 plate appearances and 200 innings pitched. Using his wins above replacement to date (1.0 fWAR), and assuming Ohtani continues his torrid pace both as a hitter and on the mound, we could expect him to be worth 15.5 total fWAR (9.2 pitching and 6.3 hitting) for the season, a staggering amount that would beat the best season on record, Ruth’s
1923 MVP campaign (15 fWAR). Of course, that was a year in which Ruth was not used as a pitcher, so just let that thought sink if for a second and appreciate how good Ruth was at the plate that season.
But sustaining greatness is obviously difficult, and Ohtani’s 2018 projections are much lower: He is pencilled in for 13 to 15 home runs and 1.0 fWAR as a hitter and is expected to go 10-7 with a 3.46 ERA (3.2 fWAR) as a pitcher in 2018.
Yet there hasn’t been a player like Ohtani since Ruth, so it’s quite possible the projections underestimate what he can do. And, since the knock on voting for a pitcher as MVP has always been the fact they play just once every five days, Ohtani also has a chance to recast this vision of what the MVP should and could be. The American League doesn’t have as strong a track record as the National League when it comes to rewarding the league leader in fWAR as the MVP, but the first-place finisher has been named the MVP four times since 2007 and in two of the past three seasons.
Ohtani could make it three of four if he continues to play like he has to start the 2018 season.