Dreams and nightmares
Dreams and nightmares
Maybe Shohei Ohtani's all-round excellence was too good to be true
Welcome to the 24th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:
I realise I keep going on about Shohei Ohtani, but if you are interested in unique stories of sustained sporting excellence you really should be following the career of the Japanese baseball superstar closely. This update, sadly, is not as positive as when we last checked in on him.
Maybe Shohei Ohtani's all-round excellence was too good to be true
One of the greatest seasons in modern baseball history began in triumph — but has now ended in acrimony.
For a detailed recap of the situation that Shohei Ohtani finds himself in, I’d recommend reading this pair of pieces written by Jeff Passan and Alden Gonzalez for ESPN over the last month.
To summarise briefly, though: Ohtani’s future is now even more uncertain than it was a couple of months ago —when free agency already loomed on the horizon — after tearing the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching arm and having surgery to repair it yesterday1.
Now that he’s been shut down completely for the season — he was continuing to hit, but strained an oblique muscle a couple of weeks ago — we can reflect more conclusively on where he already stands in baseball history.
Really, what he’s accomplished so far in his career cannot be overstated.
In yesterday’s edition of their Yahoo Sports AM newsletter2, Kendall Baker and Jeff Tracy noted that Ohtani’s 2023 season was one of the 14 most impressive of this century by baseball’s standard measure of player value: Wins Above Replacement3.
And the three-season stretch he has put together since the start of 2021 is even more impressive than that.
Major League Baseball reached its current size of 30 teams after its most recent expansion in 1998 — making this a good period to roughly define as its ‘modern’ era4.
On its website, Baseball Reference ranks the 500 greatest individual seasons across the entirety of MLB history by its version of Wins Above Replacement. Over this stretch of 26 years which we’re defining as modern professional baseball, only three players have put together a run of at least three consecutive top-500 seasons by WAR: Albert Pujols, Barry Bonds and now Shohei Ohtani5.
It’s important, too, to contextualise Ohtani’s performance relative to other Japanese players who have come across to compete in North America.
By Baseball Reference’s version of WAR, he’s already — after only six seasons — the second-most valuable Japanese player in MLB history.
And he’s produced that value much more efficiently on a per-involvement basis6, as the chart above shows.
His childhood hero Ichiro Suzuki is the only player to have moved across from Nippon Professional Baseball and contributed more career Wins Above Replacement than Ohtani — and Ichiro played in the Majors for 19 seasons7.
Where Ohtani will play his baseball going forward remains uncertain — as does the exact shape his future on-field contribution will take, despite his stated intention to “hit and pitch for many years to come” upon returning from injury.
For now, though, it’s worth remembering that — as Passan put it for ESPN last month —“[e]very minute of the past three years Shohei Ohtani spent on the baseball field was a gift”.
We may never see a stretch like it again — from him, or from anyone else.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
The current recovery timeline — according to his agent, Nez Balelo — has Ohtani playing the 2024 season as a hitter only, and returning to pitch in 2025. Balelo said: “Shohei wanted to make sure the direction taken gave him every opportunity to hit and pitch for many years to come.”
Baker’s newsletter — until recently, run out of the Axios newsroom — is an amazing daily resource; you can subscribe here.
In theory, the amount of talent in the league should have remained roughly equivalent, as no new teams — requiring more players — have been added.
Pujols had a staggering seven consecutive top-500 years at or above this level between 2003 and 2009; Bonds had four in a row — starting in his age-36 season — between 2001 and 2004. In Bonds’ best three-season stretch he produced 33 total Wins Above Replacement, and Pujols’ best produced 28; Ohtani’s 2021-to-2023 period ranks between them with 29 WAR.
I’ve used the sum of plate appearances as a hitter and batters faced as a pitcher to estimate total involvements in the chart, as really Ohtani’s aggregate experience equates to more than six individual player-seasons.
Ichiro has one season in the top 500 of all time by bWAR: his age-30 season in 2004, when he produced 9 Wins Above Replacement hitting and playing in the outfield for the Seattle Mariners.