Supernatural
Supernatural
Another way of looking at Shohei Ohtani, baseball's two-way superstar
Welcome to the 14th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:
For obvious reasons, Shohei Ohtani continues to be one of the professional athletes I feel compelled to watch week-in, week-out. Let’s see what the Japanese star has been up to since we last checked in at the start of the 2022 Major League Baseball season.
Another way of looking at Shohei Ohtani, baseball's two-way superstar
Near the start of last year, I tried to break down Shohei Ohtani’s incredible feats for the Los Angeles Angels in terms that even those unfamiliar with the sport of baseball could understand.
At that point in time, he was coming off a season in which he hit the ball cleaner than anyone else at the plate, struck out more opposing batters than the average pitcher on the mound and won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.
Ohtani is into his third consecutive season as a full-time hitter and starting pitcher, after injuries limited the volume of his contributions earlier in his major league career.
Let’s now come at these three years — including the ongoing 2023 season — from a slightly different angle. Looking at some more traditional hitting and pitching metrics, how has Ohtani performed overall in each aspect of his play since the start of 2021?
At the plate, on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) is one of the individual statistics most commonly used to get a quick read on a batter’s historic production.
OPS is an all-in-one measure of the frequency with which a player avoids making outs and gets themselves on base — either through recording a hit, or drawing a walk — and their ability to generate higher-value hits1.
The major-league average OPS since the beginning of 2021 is .719 — and Ohtani has spent the entirely of the last three seasons to date above that mark on an 81-game rolling basis2.
He is currently in the middle of one of his hottest streaks at the plate during this period, with an OPS of .973 over his last 81 games3.
And his fundamental batted-ball metrics (via Statcast) continue to stack up well against the league’s elite hitters — just as they did when we previously looked at his 2021 performance.
It is more difficult to be as definitive in assessing his performance as a pitcher — he has pitched in only 66 games in total since the start of 2021, while he has featured as a hitter in 392 — but there looks to be a pretty clear underlying trend.
Earned run average (ERA), it’s important to note, is far from a perfect metric — but tracked over a long enough period of time it can decently describe basic trends in the on-field results a pitcher generates.
The story with Ohtani is straightforward: his pitching performances steadily improved from 2021 all the way until the beginning of this season4, but he is now in one of the worst slumps on the mound he has experienced since moving to the United States.
Over his last 13 starts — all coming this season — he has allowed just over 3.5 runs to be scored against him for every nine innings he has pitched.
Dig deeper into more advanced metrics and they tell you basically the same tale: while Ohtani is still a comfortably above-average starting pitcher, this is probably his worst full season to date5 in the Majors.
With Ohtani, though, you always need to step back and consider together the entirety of what he is doing on the field.
Even though he hasn’t performed like one of the top 10 pitchers in baseball this year — as he did in 2022 — the aggregate value he has generated for his team far outstrips anyone else in the major leagues6.
If Ohtani continues at this pace for the rest of the year, a second American League MVP award could be coming his way — and with it he would join a small group of modern greats.
Only six players have won multiple regular-season MVP awards in the 21st century: Mike Trout7, Miguel Cabrera, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols and Bryce Harper.
And almost certainly coming his way in the offseason — even if he doesn’t win another MVP — is one of the most lucrative free-agent contracts in the history of professional sport.
In 2023, Ohtani has continued to play baseball like he’s from another planet — and soon enough he’ll be getting paid otherworldly amounts of money to do so.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
That is, the metric attributes commensurately more value to doubles, triples and home runs than singles.
81 games is half the length of the 162-game MLB regular season; the rolling average at the start of 2021 is calculated based on data backfilled from earlier seasons which are not plotted in the chart.
All data in this post is as at Sunday 25 June.
On a 13-start rolling basis — again, around half a season’s worth of starts.
Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) is one way in which ERA is adjusted to account for factors outside of an individual pitcher’s control; per FanGraphs, Ohtani’s 2023 FIP of 3.94 is considerably higher than 2021 (3.52) and 2022 (2.40).
His Wins Above Replacement (WAR) total so far in 2023 (as at 25 June) is 5.4; the player in second place has 4.2.
Ohtani’s current teammate on the Angels.