The Year of Ohtani | Baseball Bits

Ah yes, the week of Otani. Remember this one? He homers on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, then throws seven scoreless innings on Sunday. What a treat. Surely he won't do it for a full seat. August 18th, 2021. The Angels are in Detroit, and Tigers reliever Jose Cisnero is about to throw the meatball to end all meatballs. It's Shohei Otani's league-leading 40th homer, giving his team a much-needed insurance run late in the game. But his day isn't over. He hops back on the mound, cruising to a 1-2-3-8 inning. It wasn't always like this. 2021 was Otani's fourth year in MLB, but his first with sustained two-way success. He had a season like this before, but that was back in NPB for the Nippon Han fighters at the age of 21. And this all came on the heels of a miserable 2020 campaign that temporarily derailed his comeback to pitching from Tommy John surgery. Some would say he made his historic, unanimous MVP season look effortless, but I disagree. I think it looked impossible. A 430-foot homer and eight innings of one-run ball is a miracle, but for Shohei, it's just another day in the year of Otani. Just look at these stats. Seriously, look at them with your dumb eyeballs. You're rightfully drawn to things like 46 home runs and a 3.18 ERA, but let's talk about plate appearances and innings pitched. Baseball, at its core, is a series of 1v1 matchups between the hitter and the pitcher. Each matchup is an opportunity for both sides to influence the outcome of the game. And Otani had so many of these. He was doing just so much more baseball than anyone else. 639 plate appearances as a hitter and 533 batters faced as a pitcher adds up to 1,172 total matchups. That's 130 more than Babe Ruth had in 1918, his only true two-way season. That's 242 more than Otani's 2016 in NPB. That's 250 more than 2021's Zach Wheeler, who had the second most in MLB, and, through no fault of their own, it's far beyond what fellow MVP finalists Marcus Simeon and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. could ever dream of. It's just because they don't pitch. Shohei Otani pitches. Have you seen this? He hits, but then also, he pitches. Now I know what you're thinking. 1918 Babe Ruth is one thing, but what about ol' Custard Sauce Stevenson and 18 Flippity Dip? Well, buddy, they didn't even have the American League back then. Just tuberculosis. He pulled off this ridiculous usage in an era of load management. You'd have to go back to 1999 Randy Johnson to find a player who participated in more batter-pitcher matchups. The value of a manager is one of baseball's more unquantifiable mysteries, but in 2021, Joe Maddon made the most important personnel decision of any skipper, declaring in February that Otani needs to go out there and just be a baseball player without a lot of limitations. There wouldn't be any Shohei rules. That meant no games off before and after pitching. He was gonna get tossed back in the lineup as a DH immediately. And even in the middle of a heavy course load, Otani added extracurriculars, like his all-star break which included a 513-foot home run in the Derby. Course! And a scoreless inning versus the National League. Course! Wait, that's actually harder there. The year of Otani is really a masterpiece of energy allocation. Look at it this way. He was one of four starting pitchers to throw a baseball 101 miles per hour this year. So he had that in the tank, alongside DeGrom, Alcantara, and Cole. But when you look at their average fastball velocities with the bases empty, Otani's baseline is way lower. So what does he do? He ramps it up when he has to. DeGrom and Alcantara's velocities are basically unchanged with a runner on third. Cole adds a tick, but Otani adds 2.4 miles per hour with a runner on third compared to with the bases empty. He becomes a different pitcher when that run is just 90 feet away. So make no mistake, Shohei Otani might have played for a below 500 Angels team, but he lives for the big moment. Shohei Otani led all hitters in WPA in 2021, which means that in the context of each game, he added more win probability for his team than any other batter in the league. Oh, and these other guys? Yeah, they don't pitch. His most pivotal hit was a two-run homer, which he wrapped neatly around Fenway's pesky pole to give the Angels a lead in the ninth. That alone increased their chances of winning by 70%, giving him a .70 WPA. So good was Otani in the clutch that he had a 1276 OPS in high leverage situations. That wasn't just the best in 2021, it's the best since Lord Joseph Daniel Votto in 2012. And the madness doesn't stop there, because as a pitcher in high leverage, he had the lowest OPS against among those who started at least 20 games. So when the pressure was high, he was both the hitter and starting pitcher that you'd least want to face. Whether these crazy clutch numbers are a continuation of his ability to save energy for crucial moments, I can't say. But there's no denying Shohei Otani could get the big hit and the big out. He led MLB in ISO, a measure of in-game power where batting average is subtracted from slugging. Then there's the raw power. In April, Otani whacked a Scott Barlow fastball 119 mph for a double, which means that he's not only a member of the 101 club with DeGrom, Alcantara, and Cole, he's also a member of the 119 club with Machado and Stanton. He throws the ball hard, and he also hits the ball hard. Wow, look at him go. He's better than me. He's better than you. You are worthless. Then there's the plus stats. You seen these bad boys? We're adjusting for the ballparks and league-wide scoring environments so everyone's on equal ground. 100 is always average, and higher is better. Shohei Otani had a better OPS plus than Aaron Judge, and a better ERA plus than 20-game winner Julio Rios. In fact, let's hone in on that pitching because he had a 3.18 ERA and 141 ERA plus, meaning he was 41% better than league average at preventing earned runs. Back in 1918, when the babe was a two-way player for the Red Sox, he had a 2.22 ERA as a pitcher. So he was better, right? Wrong. This was before his bat-dragged baseball kicking and screaming into the live ball era. The American League ERA was a run and a half lower back then, meaning Ruth only had a 122 ERA plus. Otani was a better pitcher compared to the run environment he played in. So while some may call Otani the Japanese Babe Ruth, Ruth never actually had a two-way season that was quite this balanced. And even if you respect the comparisons based on pitching excellence and enormous home run power, there's another component to Otani's game that Ruth was never known for. Speed. With an average stat cast sprint speed of 28.8 feet per second, Otani was in the 91st percentile of all position players. Faster than noted speedsters like Javi Baez, Whitmerfield, Starling Marte, and Ozzie Albies. And yet, even this underrates his ability to accelerate out of the batter's box as a lefty. He averaged the 5th fastest home-to-first time in the league. Yes, hello Tim LoCastro, yes, hi, good to see you. But if you remove the part-time players and only look at those with at least 100 competitive runs, he's actually number one. Among those who played the full season, he was the fastest player to first base. So even though he's a power hitter at heart, Otani still collected 22 infield hits, including 4 of the bunt variety in 2021. So even A-Rod had something to cheer about. Haha, get it cause A-Rod likes bunts? Look, it ain't 40-40, but Shohei became just the 6th player to have 45 homers and 25 steals in a season. And if you throw in an additional requirement of at least 5 triples, he's the only 45-25-5 player in MLB history. So even if he didn't pitch, he'd be one of the premier power-speed guys in the league. Did I mention that he pitches? He has a splitter, and when he throws the splitter, they try to hit it, oh they try to hit it, but then it moves away, it moves away. If you want to compare Otani to someone who played 100 years ago, it's not Babe Ruth, it's Hall of Famer Bullet Rogan. He's been dead since the 60s, but this was a big year for Bullet Rogan. Otani's breakout sparked a re-examination of two-way players, right as MLB recognized the Negro Leagues as Major Leagues, prompting Baseball Reference to integrate their stats from seam heads. In 1922, facing top Negro League competition, Rogan had a 199 OPS plus as a hitter and a 159 ERA plus as a pitcher for the iconic Kansas City Monarchs. His 9.1 war matching Otani a century later is downright serendipitous. Although due to the cumulative nature of war and the incomplete nature of Negro League stats, Bullet Rogan may be one box score discovery away from even better numbers. They're both big-time power pitchers. Negro League catcher Frank Duncan once said Bullet had a little more steam on the ball than Satchel Paige. And while he wasn't extremely fast like Otani, Rogan was pretty solid on the base paths. Japanese Babe Ruth sure has a nice ring to it, but Japanese Bullet Rogan seems poignant as well. As great as Otani was in 2021, his numbers could have been better. No, I'm not talking about the fact his stat cast expected batting average was 10 points higher than his actual average, nor am I pointing out that he was excused from his last start of the season with the Angels out of wildcard contention. This is something a bit more salacious. With the CBA expiration looming, home plate umpiring was a hot topic this year. Many fans now advocate for an automated strike zone rather than having humans call balls and strikes. We're going to be looking at these parameters. Oh, sorry, you're more of a visual learner. We're going to be looking right here, outside off the plate by about one to four inches to a left-handed hitter. This is the problematic rectangle. And when a lefty was batting and a pitch flew into this problematic rectangle, it was called a strike 35% of the time. Not really a problem on its own. Some umps can have wider zones and be consistent with it. The more salacious part is this. When Otani was hitting, it was called a strike 43% of the time. And when he was pitching to a left-handed batter, it was called a strike 26% of the time. So over the full course of the year, Otani lost 20 ball strike calls versus the league average in this little rectangle alone. That adds up. The impact is obvious when it happens on a decisive full count pitch, but it really matters in any count. The difference between 01 and 10 going forward was over 200 points of OPS. The difference between 22 and 31 was the difference between So Otani losing out on 20 more of these calls than expected is a big deal. You know, this kind of thing has been covered in other sports. If there are certain human biases removed from MLB umpiring, there are specific players who might find things a bit easier. Not just Otani, but how about Aaron Judge? Judge has consistently been a victim of low strike calls throughout his career. Why? Because he's very tall. And it's hard for umpires to account for the fact that his knees are a little higher off the ground than everyone else's knees. See, Otani demonstrated excellence in a game that wasn't always fair to him. Uprooting your life and moving to a different continent is hard enough, but before his all-star break coming out party, Stephen A. Smith said he couldn't be the face of baseball. As if things like talent and charisma have language barriers. We talked about August 18th in Detroit, but just a day earlier, Tigers broadcaster Jack Morris made on-air comments about Otani that landed him a 3-week suspension. This is a skill set so unique across 150 years of professional baseball that you may actually feel guilty watching him. Do we, collectively as a society, deserve Shohei Otani? Probably not. So, was it the greatest season in MLB history? Well, I don't think it was the most productive. 9.1 War sells him short because his two-way status offers roster flexibility that is in itself valuable, but if I were a GM, I'd still probably rather have a peak Barry Bonds season or a peak Pedro Martinez season on my team, if given the choice. But this could be the greatest in terms of singularity and necessity. Let's face it, at his best, he's an ace pitcher, otherworldly power hitter, and a maniac on the base paths. Not an easy player to make comparisons for. And in a sport where fandom has become so regionalized, Otani's emergence as an international spectacle will have a profound effect on baseball's popularity in the coming years. There he was, sandwiched a COVID-shortened 2020 and a lockout. This fully realized baseballing supernova, incomparable to anything else in MLB history. That's the year of Otani. Thank you to my newest patrons, y'all are awesome. Thank you to William Cage for the music. It's been a great year for Foolish Baseball, so thanks for enjoying what I do.