let's get excited about...shohei otani

uh oh

Shohei Ohtani will be placed on the disabled list with a grade 2 sprain of the UCL. He underwent a PRP and Stem Cell injection yesterday with Dr. Steve Yoon in Los Angeles. He will be re-evaluated in 3 weeks and we will update his plan of care at that time.

— Angels PR (@LAAngelsPR) June 8, 2018

oh please no

I guess the blister was on his UCL... lol.

Poor guy, I really hope this doesn't turn out like Daisuke Matsuzaka pt 2.

I'mma lobby for a minimum of 6 DL spots on any fantasy league I join next year.

well there goes his All-Star DH spot

i guess the rest of MLB is gonna suck along with the Mets now

Baseball just got a lot less interesting this year.

I'm trying to recall the last time a black magic solution for avoiding TJ surgery actually worked ...?

tanaka is the only example i can recall

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/23737157/mlb-need-know-shohei-ohtani-injury

“Everything I’m hearing is that the reality is, he probably will need Tommy John surgery,” @pedrogomezESPN reports grim news for Shohei Ohtani and @Angels just now on @sportscenter. “The earliest we might see him, should he have TJ surgery, would be the 2020 season.”

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) June 11, 2018

this reminds me a lot of Strasburg

this really sucks

Source: #Angels cautiously optimistic Shohei Ohtani will play again this season — at least as a hitter and possibly in both roles. @MLB @MLBNetwork

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) June 11, 2018

Scioscia said the Angels’ medical staff is “very optimistic” about Shohei Ohtani’s prognosis. Still two to three weeks from seeing whether PRP injection took hold. Ohtani is taking one-armed swings in batting cage.

— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) June 18, 2018

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/shohei-ohtani-and-the-implications/

TS: ohtani batting with one arm vs pujols

lol

https://deadspin.com/the-story-of-shohei-ohtanis-legendary-bp-sessions-from-1827115452

sigh

straight lol at hyperbole-comparisons of soft-toss BP to in-game (esp World Series) dongs.

if people in the game are saying it, it probably means something

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/06/shohei-ohtani-cleared-to-begin-hitting-program.html

While Ohtani certainly isn’t entirely out of the woods just yet, it’s obviously an encouraging update for the Angels that the platelet-rich plasma and stem cell injections he received earlier this month have resulted in some meaningful improvement. Eppler indicated yesterday that if Ohtani were strictly a designated hitter, he’d likely have been cleared right away. That, coupled with today’s clearance, makes it seem likely that Ohtani will, at the very least, return to the Angels’ lineup at some point this summer — if not the rotation.

0-for-4 in his return last night

24 today! not in the lineup

So it's not loaded stadiums or ballparks

off the bench for heroics

https://www.mlb.com/news/shohei-ohtanis-homer-leads-angels-to-victory/c-284931188

what a shot

cautiously optimistic

https://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2018/7/20/17594856/shohei-ohtani-angels-elbow-injury-update-throwing

These splits look ugly and seem to be getting uglier...

2018 Season vs. LHP:
.170/.254/.245 22K:6BB

July:
.203/.261/.422 23K:5BB

Post All-Star:
.175/.214/.400 13K:2BB

Last 7 days:
.100/.100/.150 6K:0BB

...he must lurk here.

"closer" to pitching sez the Sosh

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24306284/shohei-ohtani-los-angeles-angels-closer-pitching-team-thought-mike-scioscia-said

Ohtani is set to throw a bullpen session this Saturday.

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."