⚾️ Even when he's injured, Shohei Ohtani can't stand still
⚾️ Even when he's injured, Shohei Ohtani can't stand still
My Week in Sport(s): stolen bases, Brighton's PL start and the Indiana Fever
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
⚾️ Shohei Ohtani, adding to his game despite a torn elbow ligament
⚽️ Brighton’s promising start to the new Premier League season
🏀 The Indiana Fever’s stars working in combination
⚾️ Even when he's injured, Shohei Ohtani can't stand still
How elite athletes change their games over time in order to stay at the very top is an aspect of professional sport which I feel is under-appreciated by more casual fans.
The career of LeBron James — who featured in this newsletter back in January — is one example of this.
Lionel Messi’s — whose evolution was captured by The Athletic in a superb piece of data journalism back in 2020 — is another.
These changes usually happen incrementally, and as a result aren’t always obvious to outside observers. That doesn’t apply to the transformation Japanese baseball star Shohei Ohtani has undergone this year, though.
I’ve written about Ohtani a number of times since launching this newsletter back in 2022 — and have tended to focus on his unique prowess as both a hitter and a pitcher.
In the first season of his 10-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, however, he has been forced to focus on just one of those disciplines.
An injury he suffered to his right ulnar collateral ligament late last year has meant that he has had to sit out this season as a pitcher.
Most of Ohtani’s spare capacity this year — while not suiting up as the Dodgers’ regular Designated Hitter — will have been devoted to rehabbing that right elbow.
But he’s also had time to take another component of his game to an elite level.
He’s currently on track to become the first ever MLB player to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season1.
While he’s hit a similar number of home runs in a single season before — he had 46 in 2021, and 44 in 2023 — he’s never stolen close to this many bases.
His previous career high was 26 in 2021.
Clayton McCullough, a member of the Dodgers’ coaching staff, doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that Ohtani’s baserunning has become more of a focus this year.
He told The Athletic in August:
MLB’s first ever 50-50 season will certainly be another historic achievement for Ohtani if and when it arrives.
But it’s worth saying that simple counting statistics are not always the best indicator of underlying skill.
And this is particularly true when it comes to stolen bases. More skilled batters get on base via hits and walks much more often than less skilled ones, and so have more opportunities to accumulate steals. This means that players’ raw stolen-base counts are far from perfectly correlated with their underlying base-stealing skills.
Helpfully, Baseball Reference tracks the number of ‘Stolen Base Opportunities2’ each player in the major leagues has over a given season. By combining these numbers with individuals’ stolen-base totals, we can get closer to an accurate appraisal of the best base-stealers in baseball.
Ohtani — who has the second-highest raw number of steals this season — drops down to fourth overall when you adjust for the number of opportunities he has had on the basepaths. He successfully steals a base around 20% of the time he has the chance to3.
But, as ever, it’s his combination of strengths which is remarkable.
No one who has recorded a similar stolen base percentage over the last two seasons4 comes remotely close to matching the rate at which he hits home runs, something he’s done in just over 7% of his plate appearances so far in 2024.
And no one who has recorded a similar home run rate has come remotely close to matching his 2024 stolen base percentage.
The chart above also illustrates the step change in Ohtani’s approach between 2023 and 2024; he only stole a base in around 9% of his available opportunities last year.
Even within the 2024 season, there’s been a clear evolution in his approach.
In a piece for FanGraphs last month which assessed the chances of Ohtani reaching the 50-50 milestone, Jay Jaffe raised an interesting point:
And this looks like it’s borne out in the numbers.
Ohtani attempted 26 steals in the Dodgers’ 97 games played before the league’s All-Star break — and has already attempted another 26 in just 46 games since that point in time5.
Incredibly, he’s also been more efficient since the All-Star game: only one of those 26 attempts was unsuccessful, compared to three of 26 beforehand.
Across the entire season, he’s been much more efficient at stealing than you’d have expected based on his career to this point: he’s been successful on more than 90% of his attempts in 2024, compared to a recorded success rate of around 70% between 2018 and 2023.
Ohtani’s exceptional performance this year — expected in some areas, and surprising in others — is a reflection of his work ethic, athleticism and understanding of the game.
But it also hints at another undiscussed aspect of sport: elite athletes, like all of us, only have a finite amount of time and energy to devote to their self-improvement.
If and when he returns to pitching, Ohtani will likely have to scale back the aggressiveness of his baserunning in order to conserve some energy for the mound (and reduce his risk of another injury).
No one will forget what he has achieved in 2024, though.
And it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t take the evolutionary ability of Ohtani — and other top sportspeople like him — for granted.
⚽️ Run the Numbers
We’re only three matches into the 2024-25 Premier League season — but a lot of smart people are already very high on Brighton6 and their new head coach Fabian Hürzeler7.
It’s hard to be too definitive about the track record of Hürzeler; the 31-year-old’s only previous managerial role was the 18 months he spent with St. Pauli in the German second division.
Before you even get to questions of technical or tactical knowledge, though, it’s clear that he fits seamlessly into the club’s distinctive off-field process in a way that his predecessor Roberto De Zerbi didn’t.
How do we know this about Hürzeler? In a recent interview with The Athletic, Brighton owner Tony Bloom couldn’t have been more explicit:
And none of the players they brought to the club this summer are more exciting — or represent better value — than Yankuba Minteh. The inverted winger only recently turned 20 years old, but has put up very impressive shot creation numbers in his first three Premier League starts.
If Minteh can perform at close to this level for a full season, then the optimism around Brighton will probably be justified — whether Hürzeler is truly an elite coaching talent or not.
🏀 Watch the Games
One of the major major questions for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever this year was how their existing All-Stars — point guard Kelsey Mitchell and big Aliyah Boston — would be impacted by the arrival of Caitlin Clark.
After a rocky start to the regular season, the Fever have now hit their stride — particularly with the ball in their own hands8.
And one neat play during the third quarter of their loss to the Las Vegas Aces on Wednesday night showed how effectively the team’s three stars can play off each other at the offensive end of the court.
After receiving an entry pass from Clark at the top of the three-point line, Boston fakes a hand-off to her rookie teammate and pivots towards the right corner, where Mitchell is stationed.
The guard starts moving around the arc towards the ball, as if she too will offer for a hand-off from Boston — but, after a single pace, she cuts sharply off her left foot behind her defender and towards the basket.
Boston hits her perfectly in stride with a bounce pass — and, with the Fever’s two remaining players cleared out to the weak side, there are no opponents who can come between Mitchell and an easy lay-up.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday September 21st.
I have a free month of paid subscriber benefits (worth $10) to ’s to give away to two of my own subscribers.
If you’d like to receive one of these gifts, reply to this email or comment below.
At time of writing, he has 47 HRs and 48 SBs; by time of publication, the Dodgers will have played their Friday night fixture against the Atlanta Braves. It would be astounding — but not impossible — for him to reach the milestone in that game.
The electric Elly De La Cruz puts even more distance between himself and the rest of the league by this metric; he has 1.3x the number of raw steals of the second-ranked player, but his stolen base percentage is 2.0x the next highest in 2024.
Since the implementation of rule changes which have created a more favourable environment for stealing bases in the Majors.
Ideally I’d have done this analysis by looking at steals as a percentage of opportunities — as above — on a rolling-average basis throughout the season, but Baseball Reference doesn’t publish Stolen Base Opportunities in its Game Logs (and it’s difficult to recalculate).
for ESPN: “Brighton's final season points projection has already jumped up by eight points compared to where it was before the season started. And the thing is, there's still so much potential upside that we haven't even seen yet.” (They have also improved significantly in ’s team strength model through three rounds.)
Ted Knutson and Kim McCauley for The Transfer Flow: “Fabian Hurzeler might have been their best signing of the summer. The young German coach put St. Pauli in the Bundesliga last season and can only be described as a likely future star in the coaching world.”
Through Wednesday’s set of games, they had the third-best offensive record in the entire league: they’ve scored 105.6 points per 100 possessions.