Archive for Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani is an interesting dude, for so many reasons. For inquisitive baseball fans, he provides all sorts of fodder. I am a big fan of Ohtani.  He has many special characteristics, which go beyond being a two-way player.

One of those characteristics is that he chose to come over to MLB two years before he could have signed for boatloads of cash. Had Ohtani waited until after the 2019 season, he could have signed for whatever a team was willing to offer. By coming over this past offseason, he could only sign a uniform player contract. The same contract given to draftees or international free agents as young as 16. Ohtani did receive a few million in the form of a signing bonus, but it was uncontroverted that he was not making his decision based on money.

There was talk that Ohtani might start this season in the minor leagues. He struggled in spring training, and the Angels could have extracted an extra year of team control by keeping him down for about three weeks. This type of service time manipulation is common if not totally accepted by baseball pundits. But it would be particularly unseemly for the Angels, having won the lottery when Ohtani chose them, to take part in this type of chicanery.

The Angels put Ohtani on the opening day roster, and if you were alive and even a casual baseball fan, you know what happened next. Ohtani lit the world on fire as both a pitcher and a hitter from the start. Ohtani throws a triple digit fastball and it was always assumed that he was going to end up providing more value as a pitcher. But through the first half of the season, Ohtani has a 145 wRC+ in 157 plate appearances. He has identical 1.1 fWARs from both sides.

However, Ohtani’s storybook beginning to his career has taken a major blow. His pitching elbow is possibly in need of Tommy John surgery. It is possible that surgery is inevitable the Angels are simply waiting until the end of the season. From a “maximizing utility” standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. If Ohtani were to go under the knife right now, he’d most likely not pitch until 2020, and would certainly be off the mound for a large portion of next season even under the best-case scenario. He would also be unable to hit for several months, probably the rest of this season. The Angels would lose Ohtani the pitcher for 2018 and 2019 and Ohtani the hitter for 2018. However, if he has Tommy John surgery at the end of the season, he can continue to hit, and the most likely outcome is that he still just misses one additional season as a pitcher. He could continue to be Ohtani the hitter in 2018 and in 2019. *

* It’s also possible that by waiting Ohtani could avoid the surgery altogether

Now comes the fun(?) part. If Ohtani were a pitcher the same way that every other major league pitcher is a pitcher, he would be on the disabled list while he recovered from Tommy John surgery. Importantly for his financial future, his service time clock would continue to run. There would be no risk of him being sent down to the minors and having his clock stop. * This raises the question: what happens if Ohtani the hitter struggles mightily and the Angels feel it is necessary to send him to the minors? Now, this seems unlikely to happen, both because of Ohtani’s strong offensive start and the solid history of top Japanese imports performing at the major league level. While this is certainly something that could happen, I am approaching this mostly as a thought experiment.

* Ohtani would need to spend 20 or more days in the minor leagues in order to lose major league service time that would push back his free agency year

I am a lawyer, but far from an expert in this area. The best I can do is to review the collective bargaining agreement and see if there are any provisions that might shed light on this. The basic rule about demoting injured players is far from detailed: “Players who are injured and not able to play may not be assigned to a Minor League club.” A player who believes his assignment is unjust can file a grievance. I didn’t read the entire CBA, but I don’t see anything else in it that would address this situation.

By the plain reading, you could say that the Angels would be perfectly within their rights. Ohtani would not be “injured and unable to play.” While he could very much say he is injured, he is also very much able to play. Ohtani could argue that the spirit of the rule would not allow him to lose service time due to the fact he is a superior enough player that it was at least thought that he could continue to be valuable as a major league player even without pitching. You shouldn’t be able to “punish” someone because they are better than everyone else. As a matter of plain fairness, this argument is as solid as an Ohtani bomb deep into the Southern California night.

Again, Ohtani seems unlikely to make this scenario a reality. But Brendan McKay is coming up the Rays system. It is possible we will see more two-way players. Looking beyond just Ohtani, it is very much conceivable that this could become an issue at some point. It makes sense for MLB and the union to figure this out before it becomes an embarrassing (international) incident.

Because I believed Jeff Sullivan that there was a 2% chance Ohtani would sign Friday, I wrote this article, that now reads a bit weird, but I’m not going to change it because I have to get back to the job that I do for money instead of for fun. Any complaints about said weirdness should be addressed to Jeff Sullivan.

The phrase “sure thing” is thrown around a lot in sports to describe things that are not actually sure things. Atlanta was going to win the Super Bowl. Up 25 points, it was a sure thing until it wasn’t. Shohei Ohtani is not a sure thing to be a superstar in MLB, or even an All-Star. He’s not even a sure thing to be an average big-league player. History is littered with players that were star players one day and also-rans the next. But what Ohtani is a sure thing to do is pay off his price tag. Barring a tragic accident or something else outside of the realm of baseball, the team that signs Ohtani will surely earn more than $20.5 million extra during the 2018 baseball season that they would not have earned without him.

To understand why this is a certainty, you can look at Stephen Strasburg in 2010. The Nationals were the worst team in baseball in 2009, finishing with 59 wins for the second consecutive season. They were not much better in 2010, adding 10 more wins to that total, but still finishing 5^th in the NL East. Their overall attendance for 2010 was bad, which is to be expected. 1,828,066 were said to have paid money to see the Nationals play that year, or about 22,500 per game. That was only about 10,000 higher, on the season, than they managed in 2009. Strasburg’s first game was electric (I was there). It was the kind of atmosphere that made no sense at all for a team that was mired in long-term terribleness. The game, played on a Tuesday, sold out with attendance only rivaled that season by opening day, up to that point.

But that only tells a small part of the story. The two Tuesday games the Nationals had played at home prior to this game averaged about 16,000 fans. It’s pretty safe to say that this game, against the Pirates, would have been in a similar range without Strasburg. But the Strasburg effect was much wider reaching. First, once it became known that Strasburg was pitching, the Nationals created a ticket package to sell many of the unsold tickets. The package included the Strasburg game, plus three additional games. For those that came to the stadium without a ticket, their choices were between that and the suddenly busy scalpers.

The weekend before Strasburg’s debut, the Nationals drew almost 91,000 fans against the Reds. That was about 6,000 more than they drew during their previous weekend series against the Orioles. But the Orioles are not really a fair comparison because they are Beltway rivals of the Nationals. If you go back the weekend series before that, when the Nationals were playing the Marlins, just over 63,000 came to the ballpark. Now, some of this might have been random or based on other factors, but fans were anticipating Strasburg’s debut and buying tickets in anticipation of it — fans including the humble author of this post. Some even speculated that the Nationals intentionally misled fans in order to juice the gate.

Strasburg’s second start was in Cleveland, who also seemed to have benefited from a large Strasburg-related spike in attendance for that game. His third game was a Friday and was sold out. Again, even weekend games prior to Strasburg were sparsely attended. The Saturday game after his start was nearly sold out, likely due to fans incorrectly believing it was going to be the day Strasburg pitched. His 3^rd home game was the first that did not sell out. But there is more to the story (again, I was there). This game was played during the week, during the day, and it was literally at or above 100 degrees that day. There were still almost 32,000 fans there. After pitching on the road, Strasburg again sold out the stadium for his 6^th start and had a large, but not sold-out game for his 7^th. His next home start, another Tuesday game, again sold out. I’ve probably gone on long enough, if not too long. If you didn’t know how much Strasburg boosted attendance, you do now.

And here is the question: As much hype as there was in D.C. during the summer of 2010, do we really think that Ohtani’s hype won’t meet or perhaps even far exceed it? I certainly do. Additionally, the team that signs Ohtani will have a much easier time plotting and planning exactly how they can wring the most dollars possible out of their fans. In 2010, the Nationals created a multigame package on the fly, but now teams are exploring more and more ways of earning extra dollars through dynamic pricing. If a team like Seattle were to get Ohtani and announces that he’ll be pitching the second game of the season, the added revenue they would be able to earn would be astounding. Last season, the Mariners’ attendance dropped from 44,856 on opening day to 18,527 the next day. With Ohtani, it’s safe to say they’d sell out their second game.

If you’ve stayed with me this long, you might be wondering “yeah, I knew all of this already, so what?” And yes, most FanGraphs readers probably already believed that Ohtani is going to really juice attendance wherever he ends up. But then, why did three teams not even bother to try to acquire him? There simply is no justification. If you are the Marlins, you can do both things. You can say you are cutting payroll by $50 million, but at the same time if Ohtani for some reason picks the Marlins (he wouldn’t), you find the $20 million to pay him. You will get it back and more. Take out a loan. Heck, take out a payday loan with onerous and unfair terms and you will still end up ahead. It simply makes no sense. He is, from a financial standpoint, literally a sure thing.

We find ourselves in the midst of an exceptionally intriguing offseason. Rarely is there an opportunity to acquire a prior year’s MVP and remain in position to nab the number-two asset on the market: Shohei Ohtani. Given Ohtani’s decision to forego a contract that syncs up with his open-market value when he turns 25, he’ll hold a Black Friday-esque price-tag when posted. Virtually any team in baseball can make a play to acquire the former star from the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, regardless of wallet size. That makes this particular campaign for a generational talent so intriguing.

Whether your team meets Ohtani’s duo of wants — independent of a passing grade on his questionnaire — is another story.

The San Francisco Giants are in a precarious position heading into 2018. Coming off a 64-win season, the lowest win total for their franchise since 1994, and the lowest of Bruce Bochy’s tenure by seven games, a rebound seems imminent. The current state of their roster, however, casts doubt on how relevant a rebound can make their team.

So, I sent out a tweet entertaining the possibility that one team lands the two biggest names of the offseason.

In the theoretical universe where the Giants land #Stanton and #Ohtani – what’s their win total in 2018? #MLB (64 Ws in ’17 for reference)

— Lance Brozdowski (@LanceBrozdow) November 19, 2017

A little bit of mental math brought my over/under to 87.5 wins. Imprecise? Sure, but only three times since 2014 has one team improved on their prior year win total by more than 24 games: the Minnesota Twins (2016 to 2017, +26 wins), Arizona Diamondbacks (2016 to 2017, +24 wins), and Chicago Cubs (2014 to 2015, +25 wins). Whether a signal or mere noise, each of those improvements came without lavish acquisitions during winter (I used my subjective definition of “lavish”). Each was propelled to relevance by internal talent (Buxton/Sano, Ray/Godley, Arrieta/Bryant, etc.), superb management, and other favorable nods from the Baseball Gods. Each of the 29 responses to my poll came with three elements of consideration: Ohtani, Stanton, and everything else.

Ohtani

The pitching side of Ohtani’s value is interesting. ZiPS and Dan Szymborski were the first to throw their hat in the ring, giving Ohtani a 3.55 ERA over 139 innings of work, with 161 strikeouts, and a walk rate of 3.9 BB/9. It’s lukewarm, considering the hype around Ohtani and knowledge of his sub-1.1 WHIP over in the NPB. Do I agree with it? Not from a control standpoint, but we can work with it and my disagreement isn’t dismissal of a labor-intensive statistical model’s projection.

Taking the three essential components of FIP (walks, strikeouts, and homers), and our knowledge that pitcher fWAR is derived from FIP, we can backtrack from Ohtani’s ZiPS projection and in an anti-statistician kind of way. By comparing Ohtani’s per-nine peripherals to last year’s performers, we can infer his fWAR might be around 3.0 as a pitcher in 2018 (139 IP, 10.4 K/9, 3.9 BB/9, 1.0 HR/9). This ZiPS and fWAR magic says he’ll be slightly worse than 2017 Brad Peacock (that was a weird sentence to write).

Ohtani’s potential 3.0 fWAR is backed up when you look at his 2016 in the NPB. The righty posted 137 1/3 innings of work, with a 9.2 K/9, 2.9 BB/9, and a HR/9 just north of 1.0. This gives Ohtani something slightly better than Jose Berrios’ 2.8 fWAR 2017 campaign (an equally weird sentence to write).

Value for Ohtani with his bat on the Giants, a team obviously absent of a DH, is where confusion starts.

I want to keep this as simple as possible. It’s unlikely that he goes to the NL if contributing significantly on the mound and in the box are his main goals. The inherent risk for the lottery-winning club would be too high and uncertainty around whether Ohtani would prefer such a role plays an equally large factor. Travis Sawchik breaks Ohtani’s NL hitting value down better than I ever could, so I’ll only give you the product of his analysis.

Ohtani could have about 1.6 fWAR as a hitter. This is composed of 1.1 fWAR in his standard pitcher plate appearances, plus another .5 fWAR from regular pinch-hitting chances (emphasis on the word “regular”).

In total, we have a 4.6 fWAR player in Shohei Ohtani in the National League. Our 3.0 fWAR on the mound and an aggressive — but feasible — 1.6 fWAR in the box.

To find 88 wins for the Giants that my poll responders believe in, we need to start somewhere. It’s too easy to begin at a projection already circulating for the Giants’ 2018 win total, so I’ll make this hard for myself to execute, and likely, for you to rationalize. Let’s start with those 64 hard-fought wins Bochy’s squad scratched and clawed their way to. We’ll work backwards from there.

64 wins, plus roughly five we’re going attribute to Ohtani brings us to 69.

Stanton

Now onto Stanton.

Eno Sarris, a familiar name to many, looked through the surplus value on a trade that would send Stanton to the Bay Area. The names included in that analysis revolve around the following:

To SF: Stanton, Dee Gordon

To MIA: Joe Panik, Tyler Beede, Chris Shaw

We don’t have confirmation this would be the package, but I remain adamant Miami wants contract relief more than anything. Centering an offer around the eight FanGraphs wins above replacement (fWAR) Panik has accumulated in his career feels like a proper balancing of sides, given how much money the Giants would take on in a scenario like this. Whether Stanton opts out or stays through the length of his contract muddies just how much money the Giants, or any team, will tie up through 2027. Although it seems like a risk teams are willing to take, how that opt-out risk factors into offerings is another confounding input.

However, Stanton’s value to teams from a performance standpoint is less cloudy than his monetary value. He’s good. Very good. Completing two 6-fWAR seasons before turning 28 is desirable trait for any player. One of the first projections kicking around — FanGraphs’ Steamer — holds Stanton somewhat steady with his torrid 2017.  5.3 fWAR, buoyed by another 45+ homer season, and a wRC+ that holds up to his career standard. I have little objection to this, even if worry consumes you that a healthy season for Stanton was an anomaly.

Ohtani brought us to 69 wins and now Stanton will take us north of the only number above 15 anybody is ever excited to see. We’re at 74 for the Giants by taking WAR and interpreting them as literal wins, something I probably shouldn’t do given the debate the industry just had, but I’ll test my luck.

Everything else

This subheading encompasses a lot of assumptions. In my tweet asking my loyal followers to quickly gauge whether the Giants could get above the 87.5 wins, this considered everything from a (hopefully) full season of good Madison Bumgarner and paying a priest to rid the bad juju from the Giants’ clubhouse, to a minor investment in separate baseballs juiced specifically for AT&T Park.

We could venture another 1,000 words on the improvements of San Fran, but there are far more qualified Giants fans on this website and others (shoutout to Grant Brisbee at McCovey Chronicles) that have surely detailed this difference with more care and a deeper knowledge of the Giants’ issues and internal fixes.

Cutting to the chase, let’s make a simple push to the 88-win mark. FanGraphs’ depth-chart projections currently has the Giants as a 78-win team. That’s 14 wins better than 2017. It is also exactly what we need to go from 74 wins to 88.

Sometimes, things work out better than anybody could have ever planned.

We found our 88 wins.

The only thing I’m left wondering is whether my tweet and over/under projection at 87.5 inspired hopes of 90-plus-win seasons in voters’ minds. If Bochy & Co. can accomplish that feat without even one of Ohtani or Stanton, I commit to paying the shipping fee for Bochy’s Manager of the Year Award.

A version of this post can be found on my site, BigThreeSports.com, by following this link.