let's get excited about...shohei otani

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."

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