let's get excited about...shohei otani

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/how-good-is-shohei-otani/

Back in November, we contributed a post about Japanese superstar Shohei Otani, noting that the 22-year-old hurler already projected as one of the best pitchers on the planet, and would be one of the most coveted international imports in baseball history if his NPB team, Nippon Ham, decided to make him available to MLB clubs. Since that time, Otani’s 2016 season has only expanded his legend.

On the mound, Otani has had another great year, allowing a 2.25 ERA in 16 starts and racking up 140 strikeouts in 116 innings. But his real coming out party has been at the plate, as he’s forced his way into the lineup on a regular basis, becoming a legitimate two-way player. In 301 plate appearances, he’s hitting .333/.435/.631, which means he leads the league in OPS. With all due respect to Madison Bumgarner and the #PitchersWhoRake hashtag, Otani looks like something the likes of which we don’t currently have in MLB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGS0lIiXkRQ

i was just about to start a thread on him after reading the same article! if an american league team could acquire him and put him at DH on days when he isn't pitching...O_O

new favorite player

www.fangraphs.com/blogs/will-otani-change-the-game/

the NL vs AL choice is going to be very interesting

it sucks knowing that he's inevitably going to play for the dodgers, red sox, or yankees.

i imagine his chances of being a star pitcher are greater than his chances of being a star hitter, so NL would make the most sense -- but if he could be a #1 pitcher and an above-average DH...

that's the dream, at least. if the guy can actually hit .300 that's an entirely different league than Bumbarger, whose slash line is .186/.236/.327. we've had guys like that before...Grienke, Zambrano, etc.

To better understand Otani I spoke with Anri Uechi of Kyodo News, who covers Masahiro Tanaka and the Yankees but also has followed the career of Otani. I asked Uechi for a comps on Otani as a pitcher and hitter. He came up with a blend of Yu Darvish — only with more velocity – and Christian Yelich. Hey, not bad.

O_O

if he's going to alternate between pitching and the outfield we can all look forward to many years of waiting for him to be off the disabled list

reportedly coming

http://nypost.com/2017/09/13/japanese-two-way-superstar-coming-to-majors/

yep, seems to be the word

dave cameron: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/how-to-sign-shohei-otani/

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/is-ohtani-really-more-valuable-in-the-al/

we need a mod to change the thread title (otani > ohtani)

congrats Yankees

supposedly both are correct? https://medium.com/@DanielBrim/is-it-otani-or-ohtani-4e6548c27ed6

tbh he should demand in his contract that he gets 大谷

https://i.imgur.com/hOIuAdK.gif

yeah I thought I'd just erred but i've consistently been seeing Ohtani and Otani in different media.

Breaking: players union sets Monday deadline to resolve posting issue. So in 4 days otani could know if he'll be able to jump to mlb in '18.

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) November 16, 2017

Brian: Where does “the Mets are CONSIDERING pursuing Ohtani” rank among saddest baseball offseason rumors? Is there anything to consider?

Dave Cameron: Any team that doesn’t have, at minimum, an intern putting together a powerpoint to send to the agent just in case should be embarrassed.

It’s a free lottery ticket. All 30 teams should make a bare minimum “we’re interested if you are!” pitch

Elementary brain: Otani

Expanding brain: Ohtani

Galactic brain: Ōtani

— Sung Min Kim (@sung_minkim) November 22, 2017

Over the weekend, executives across baseball hunkered down in their offices to fill out a document. One general manager called it “the most important paper I’ve written since college.” Another scrambled to find someone to translate his version into proper Japanese. An executive, short on sleep, long on frustration, said: “This is so stupid.”

In anticipation of Shohei Ohtani’s posting, the agents for the 23-year-old Japanese star sent a memo to all 30 teams, asking them to explain why Ohtani fits in their organization. Some executives rolled their eyes. Others saw it as an opportunity to differentiate themselves. Each wound up doing the same thing: Putting together their best sales pitch for what everyone agrees is a once-in-a-lifetime player, not simply because of his talent as a pitcher and hitter but the absurd discount in which teams may realize well over $100 million in surplus value.

“Shohei Ohtani,” one agent said, “is like the baseball version of the new Amazon headquarters.”

https://sports.yahoo.com/four-reasons-mlbs-hot-stove-lukewarm-022841950.html

oh man, if you're a team submitting only a "paper" in response to the ohtani request, you are so not going to be chosen

yeah u gotta have holograms at a minimum these days

we need a mod to change the thread title (otani > ohtani)

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, November 15, 2017 11:39 AM (one week ago)

yeah no, should we start spelling Osaka "Ohsaka"?

One general manager called it “the most important paper I’ve written since college.” ... an executive, short on sleep, long on frustration, said: “This is so stupid.”

I really see both sides of this. On one hand, he's a great young talent that will sign for far below his market value. On the other hand, almost every Japanese player who made the jump to MLB was overhyped and underdelivered.

is it true that the ball in the Japan leagues is smaller, because if so that seems like it could make a world of difference

I am sure this dude will be pretty decent in the majors but "once-in-a-lifetime"...idk they were saying that about Yu Darvish and he's one of the better guys to come over

Al R. B.
Yeah see the brief discussion on that upthread. A lot of the media has been referring to him with the ‘h’ recently so I didn’t realize that it can other way.

Shohei Ohtani obliterated the Philadelphia Phillies, alas pic.twitter.com/Asam3vY7qt

— John Trupin (@JohnTrupin) December 1, 2017

Some news out on finalists...

It would be pretty cool if he ended up going to someone totally unexpected.

I noticed Houston was not listed as out.

not the Yankees!

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/shohei-ohtani-has-narrowed-his-list/

The angry twitter comments were so great.

it's definitely an odd mix of teams ... he wants west coast, but cubs and rangers still in play; he wants a smaller market, but LA and chicago and dallas are still in play. it would be so weird if he went to the padres.

hahahah that would be awesome

it seems pretty he'll actually end up on the cubs so i'm just hoping he doesn't go to the dodgers.

pretty unlikely, that is. meant to delete "pretty" because i overuse it and deleted the wrong word.

If ohtani goes to the cubs and stanton says no to the cardinals because stl is a shithole, I am going to be so cranky this off-season

kinda hoping he goes to the mariners only in part because they're one of "my teams" but mostly because before the posting i called mariners to my friend and i would love to be right for ONCE

mariners would be pretty boring tbh

padres padres padres

it is going to be the Dodgers and you know it.

I think Ohtani goes to Seattle. There are Japanese there. And if they had Ichiro make a call, my God, to a Japanese kid that's like hearing Ruth and Dimaggio and Mantle and God.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 4, 2017

The key now for the Mariners is to make sure Ohtani doesn’t visit Seattle until the sun comes back out in June

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) December 3, 2017

this is something

On Shohei Ohtani, @jimcallisMLB reports grades of "80 raw power, 65 speed, 80 arm, [and] 50 hit," in a @mike_petriello article: https://t.co/wySSnmiKnw

Here are some hitters with similar grades: pic.twitter.com/R61g519MsF

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) December 6, 2017

It's real nice in Seattle right now.

I mean the Mariners will find a way to waste his potential if they do sign him but it would be cool to have something to be stupidly optimistic about.

65 speed seems low, people were saying the kid can really fly

Angels landed him.

unexpected!

pitches Sunday night!

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24526952/shohei-ohtani-returning-angels-rotation

hell yeah! i was trying to keep my hopes realistic

they must be pretty confident that he's healthy given that they're out of the playoff hunt...

velocity cratered in the third

http://www.latimes.com/sports/angels/la-sp-angels-ohtani-hernandez-20180902-story.html#

"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism."

tl;dr for Tracer:

Ohtani's velocity trends tonight are absolutely horrifying pic.twitter.com/2l0aUPamUM

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) September 3, 2018

fuck this

hit 2 homers last night

so I guess that begs the question, if he has TJ tomorrow can he still hit in 2019?

Angels saying it depends what the doctors say (ie they aint saying)

Weiters didn't

Ohtani's Elbow:

Why would LAA want, or let Ohtani pitch this season after the elbow injury? Is there ANY reasoning behind this?

Jay Jaffe:

The Angels had almost nothing to lose by testing Ohtani's elbow. If he has the surgery now, there's a reasonable shot he can still DH for most/all of next season while not pitching, but if they waited until spring for the surgery, he'd be unable to do either.

Jeff Fletcher, who covers the Angels for the Orange County Register, put it well in a tweet:

"If Ohtani had TJ surgery on June 7, 2018 -- the day the sprain was discovered -- he'd be out till 2020.

"If he has it tomorrow, he'll be out till 2020.

"If he has it a week from now, he'll be out till 2020."

absolutely scorching: 240 wRC+, 10 homers in 90 PA since august 1st

https://www.fangraphs.com/splitstool.aspx?playerid=19755&position=DH&splitArr=&strgroup=season&statgroup=1&startDate=2018-08-01&endDate=2018-09-08&filter=&statType=player&autoPt=true&players=&pg=0&pageItems=30&sort=-1,1

official

https://www.mlb.com/news/ohtani-to-undergo-tommy-john-surgery/c-295987406

in games where he pitches, does he get defensive credit for being a pitcher? his defensive adjustment is largely negative because he's played DH 90% of the time, but I would assume that for the plate appearances where he's listed as the pitcher, he'd get a generous positive adjustment

this is from bbref:

Pitcher Positional Adjustment. Now, pitchers also bat, so we need to calculate their Position Player WAR as well. Since pitcher fielding is included in Pitcher WAR, we do not need to consider it here. Pitchers are almost guaranteed to be below replacement hitters and likely no one uses a particular player as a pitcher because they are a good hitter. If that were the case, we might see teams trying for an advantage by routinely using Wilson Valdez as a pitcher or an NL team would always value Jon Lester less than an AL team. Rather, any pitcher hitting is gravy, so the pitcher position adjustment is set so that all pitchers taken together produce zero WAR as position players. As position players, we say a pitcher's games played equals PA/4.

To set the pitcher positional adjustment, we add together every pitcher's Batting Runs, Baserunning Runs,and GIDP Runs = Runs_sum_lg. We also add up their Plate Appearances, PA_sum_lg. The league-wide pitcher positional adjustment is then (-600 * Runs_sum_lg/ PA_sum_lg) which is runs per plate appearance. For a particular player, this number is then multiplied by their plate appearances for their individual positional adjustment.

The top and worst pitcher as position players in 2011 were: best: Carlos Zambrano 7.6 runs, worst: Ryan Dempster -4.8 runs.

note: Some pitchers like Red Ruffing, Bob Lemon and Jim Kaat (as a pinch runner) appeared in many games as a position player, pinch hitter or pinch runner. If we credit them these PA's as just a pitcher then we overvalue their offense, so to handle this we compute a percentage of time as a non-pitcher for all pitchers and they get credit under runs_replacement for this number of games and their runs_position as pitcher are reduced by one minus this factor. Since many of these occurred prior to full play-by-play data, we just use games played data for this adjustment.

non-Pitcher factor
= (Games Played - Games Pitched - .63 * Games as PH or PR)
--------------------------------------------------------
Games Played
.63 is a factor so we value Games Played in the field differently than as a PH or PR which are likely just a single PA.

for example it looks like shohei has about 12-14 plate appearances as a pitcher this season, and the rest of his 177 PA are at DH (plus one or two in left or right field)

his positional adjustment overall as a batter on bbref is -4 runs

yordan alvarez, who's played DH for all 160 of his PAs this year, has a positional adjustment of -3 runs

max scherzer has had 17 plate appearances, and has a positional adjustment of +3 runs

does this make sense? shouldn't he get credit for these PAs as a pitcher?

talking about the positional adjustment for WAR if it wasn't clear

I think the DH adjustment still should be applied because the Angels aren’t forced to bat him when he pitches. the replacement for him when he’s hitting as a pitcher would be another DH.

hmmm that makes sense

I wasn't paying attention to baseball at all last year, so I missed that he got shelled in his two starts, leading to a real quirk in his lifetime stats:

2018 - 51.2 IP, 3.31 ERA
2020 - 1.2 IP
2021 - 47.1 IP, 2.85 ERA

Career ERA: 3.67

He gave up 7 runs in that 1.2 IP. His career ERA would be 3.09 otherwise.

Caption to a photo that turned up on my FB wall:

John Olerud pitching in college at Washington State. He was 15-0 his sophomore year with 23 homers and hit .464.

More details here:

https://247sports.com/college/washington-state/article/john-olerud-wsu-baseball-1998-season-was-simply-magical-211886430/

Facebook/Twitter meme, so I don't know how trustworthy, but:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBV2oDsW8AAXOYZ.jpg:large

From the man's owns hands:

"Shohei Otani" is visible alongside various bank account and wire-transfer information and the word "loan."

Can we keep our libellous Shohei speculation in one thread please

Shohei impending ban from baseball announcement due in 3 days; my sources have confirmed

The latest on the firing of Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter amid questions about the transfer of $4.5 million from Ohtani’s bank account to a bookmaking operation under federal investigation, from ESPN’s Tisha Thompson: https://t.co/M8qfg9lElk pic.twitter.com/reo8s272Pb

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 20, 2024

the most likely explanation of this is Ippei falling on his sword?

or getting pushed onto it

The story in my head (which is most generous to Shohei) is: Ippei got that gambling gene, Shohei helps him out a bit, Shohei/Shohei's lawyers say "hey, you can't give money to your right hand man to gamble as a top sports player, heard of pete rose?" Shohei says "Ippei, it's time to go "

^^so yeah, a mix of falling and pushing. Obvs heaps of conjecture but that seems like the simplest explanation with the facts laid out. That said, I am fully ready to laugh into the abyss when Shohei gets banned from baseball and the Dodgers stay on the hook for 700mil

Can we keep our libellous Shohei speculation in one thread please

― Roman Anthony gets on his horse (gyac), Wednesday, March 20, 2024 3:54 PM (five minutes ago)

This thread is only for people who spell his family name OTANI or 大谷, people like... Shohei Otani himself.

Surely getting banned from MLB for gambling would be a breach of contract and invalidate the Doyers salary payment obligations, no?

If not, well played *checks notes* Nez Balelo

Maybe. Dodgers stayed on the hook for Bauer the whole time 'that' mess went down iirc.

The really interesting question here is, suppose my story is relatively correct and with the feds looking into it, mlb/feds can see shohei did transfer to illegal bookies.... Is Ohtani too big to fall? It's obviously in the interest of MLB to sweep this one as deep under the rug as possible, but do they have the levers to do that? Do the feds care?

Maybe it's a trap to bring him back to the Korean or Japanese leagues. "Banned from MLB, what a shame"

He and Bauer could finally be bunkmates

So he either goes 5/5 5hr's or 0/5 5k's tonight right

Cannot believe this is happening. Wake me up in a week when he's suspended or when he beats the rap. It's all too much for me

feeling some whiplash after only having just learned about the existence of ippei from the breathless sports illustrated article that calls ippei shohei's bestest and most beloved friend

Verducci’s prose has really fallen off. Are we sure that’s him? I mean this is giving big Allegra Coleman energy:

But like an Italian sports car, even at rest his angularity and aura connotate agility and speed. The power is all under the hood.

I’m bumping this non canonical thread solely for Steve Shasta

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJMwnsvXUAEX04s?format=jpg&name=small

I'm kinda curious about who knew what and when between LAD/MLB/Otani's PR dept because Ippei getting fired only AFTER the story broke AND his interview(s) is incredibly sketchy...

I don’t know the exact exact timeline but I think the LA Times story (ippei stealing) dropped right before the ESPN one (two stories). Ohtani’s agents are professionals, I don’t see how the first interview fuckup happened

https://i.imgur.com/K4HSNvI.jpeg

Ohtani and Arraez both made out their first time up; remote longshot now.

https://www.mlb.com/news/shohei-ohtani-aaron-judge-triple-crown-chances

Pretty sure it would have been management's decision to sit Arraez yesterday, and (unlike the Pirates pulling Skenes after two innings yesterday) the Padres are headed to the playoffs. So I get it. But I wish Arraez had pushed back: "Look, this other guy has a chance to make history;* I should play." I'm operating on 1941 time here, I know. (Even in the '70s guys were sitting out to protect batting titles.)

*So does Arraez, of course, with a third consecutive batting title for three different teams. All the more reason to play.

Ohtani and Arraez both made out their first time up; remote longshot now.

with that kind of physical chemistry being evident from the very start, expectations for long distance were probably a little unrealistic than they should have been

Arreaz just doubled (1-3); Ohtani's 0-3. So much for that...

lol zach

I'd like to subscribe to your fanfic mailing list z_tbd

i appreciate that, but my one attempt at fan fic did not go well

Roy Orbison wrapped in clingfilm

I know some of you sickos are missing baseball rn and need to see this

pic.twitter.com/OkhXnt0Y53 https://t.co/66oNtWjqF7

— Chad Moriyama (@ChadMoriyama) October 22, 2024

nsfw tag pls