shohei ohtani alert

i just think, if you're a catcher, maybe it's like try playing a real position and then we can give you a meaningful WAR

man and I thought *I* had the most extreme catcher-value related challops on ilx!

as somebody once said, 90% of this game is mental, and the other half is physical. the rest is catching

500-ft. HR, 30 before the break.

https://www.mlb.com/news/30-or-more-home-runs-before-mlb-all-star-game-c266214234

sometimes i see clips of his homers and think huh, i didn’t expect that to get out

this was not one of them

dude fuckin cranks

yeah, that ball was DISMISSED

wow

279 wRC+ in june

Posnanski's column today:

Ohtani is coming off a June in which he hit .394 and slugged .952. That .952 slugging percentage is the third-highest EVER RECORDED for the month of June. Check out this list:

Babe Ruth, June 1921, .979 SLG
Babe Ruth, June 1920, .960 SLG
Shohei Ohtani, June 2023, .952 SLG
Lou Gehrig, June 1936, .934 SLG
Lou Gehrig, June 1930, .919 SLG

(Most of the column is devoted to the Braves, who--I can be miraculously oblivious to these things--were 21-4 in June.)

31. (The other guy homered too.)

Pulled early again with a blister, almost certainly not pitching at ASG

Shohei Ohtani (via interpreter Ippei Mizuhara) on whether the finger blister is relate to the cracked nail from his last pitching start: "It's basically the same thing as last time. It wasn't fully healed. It's gotten kind of worse as the game went on."

— Sarah Valenzuela (@Sarah_IsabelVee) July 5, 2023

he needs to do the derby fuck the game itself

wonder if the Angels are pondering trading him in the wake of the Trout injury. I know that move would be massively unpopular but Fangraphs has their playoff odds at 20% currently (only 4.5% to actually win the division) and they could get an insane haul for him, possibly the best midseason haul ever. I really hope they don't and think doing so would be bad for the game but they have to be considering it, right??

Not sure if you saw this: https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-rumors-trades-and-signings?t=trades-and-transactions

i think they want to re-sign him and if they trade him that seems very unlikely so i think they will just pray for a miracle that they can make some noise in the playoffs this year & that he decides to re-sign w/ them for whatever reason. i highly doubt he re-signs there tho

^^^

when he first came over, he wanted to be on the west coast. i presume that that is no longer a major factor

Honestly can’t see him going to an east coast team. I could be wrong but physical proximity to Japan & all the money a team rakes in from being able to run Japanese advertising to viewers there in a more favourable timezone…but who knows. Personally think he’s a Dodger.

i'm sure he will entertain the yankees, i don't think playing in new york hurt the japanese stars before him. but otherwise it feels like it's gonna be the dodgers, giants, mariners... i'm sure the padres will throw their hat in the ring but idk how they could make that payroll work. sluggers don't like to seem the giants -- both stanton & judge turned them down. i feel like it's the dodgers too but i wouldn't rule out seattle for obvious reasons

I would love it to be Seattle - great pitcher’s park, Ichiro there every day - but he was absolutely miserable playing in cold weather apparently & more chance of that there (& in SF) than LA. SF also preferable for me and I think it being a historically good pitchers park would be in their favour. Think Judge just wanted to stay a Yankee and was never going to move once they gave him an acceptable offer.

all the money a team rakes in from being able to run Japanese advertising to viewers there in a more favourable timezone…but who knows

AIUI, foreign media/markets and merch are all pooled so any team that signs him doesn't make all that much money from the Japanese market - tourists coming to Ohtani home games, some in-stadium advertising but it wouldn't cover much of a $40mn+/yr contract (particularly if you're the Dodgers and already basically selling out every home game).

35 in 94 games, 18 in 31--on pace for 60.

"doing a Ruth" while casually dealing to the tune of 3.50 ERA

Old-guy stuff, I know, but I like it anyway.

https://i.postimg.cc/wMxnQJvJ/winfield.jpg

that bat flip was a thing of beauty

home run #35 for shohei and then an elite bat flip 🔥 pic.twitter.com/59WTacp8rp

— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) July 18, 2023

This is really amazing if accurate (the HR check out, although I have Ohtani playing slightly fewer games...I guess he's had a few where he pitched but didn't hit; haven't checked the pitching side of it).

- Babe Ruth: 159 home runs in his first 674 career games / W-L 35-18 in his first 455.0 career innings pitched.

- Shohei Ohtani: 160 home runs in his first 674 career games / W-L 35-19 in his first 455.0 IP career innings pitched. pic.twitter.com/6L8kkHUvEp

— Héctor Gómez (@hgomez27) July 17, 2023

(I assume they had to remove a photo of Ruth eating 12 hot dogs.)

One more, pertinent to the Winfield tweet:

Bill: What do you believe is more impressive/difficult to accomplish: Being a Two-Way player like Shohei Ohtani or playing 2 sports at the same time like Bo Jackson/Deion Sanders did with Baseball/Football?
Asked by: Taylor

Answered: 7/17/2023
The most difficult feat in the area is writing about baseball and also writing true crime books. Joking. I doubt that being a two-way player in one sport is more difficult than playing two different sports. I think there are and have been other players who could have done it, if given the opportunity--not at the level Ohtani is doing it, but they could have done it. Greinke could have done it. Ken Brett could have done it. Micah Owings could have done it. Many Negro League players DID do it...Double Duty Radcliffe, obviously, but also many others.

(I don't take that as criticism at all: "not at the level Ohtani is doing it.")

to be fair to ruth the first few years of his career were in the deadball era

Which made the pitching easier and the hitting harder...As I've said a few times on here, I've become very skeptical of baseball records pre-integration/pre-War, although players that bridge both eras--Williams, Musial, Spahn--I'd at least give them a pass, since they were still premier players during the heyday of Mays, Mantle, and Aaron. It's a continuum. In the end, I guess I really don't know what Ruth would do playing today.

my kids would call him "big bunda"

https://thetomspowerpop.bandcamp.com/track/angel-on-the-mound-shohei-ohtani

Not quite "Mrs. Robinson," but not bad!

(I have that Toms compilation...I knew it looked familiar.)

for no reason i can adequately explain i am a huge tommy marolda fan. haven't really followed baseball since the twins won the '87 world series, tho.

pulled from a blog online, these are the players who led the league in homers and triples in the same season, like Ohtani is doing now:

Harry Stovey (2x)
Tip O'Neill
Harry Lumley
Jim Bottomley
Tommy Leach
Willie Mays
Mickey Mantle
Jim Rice

Rice used to ground into a million double plays, surprised by that.

i was kinda surprised too, it's not like he was one of those five tool contributors, he wasn't a Dawson or Walker or Bonds. must have been finding those gaps (not much of a doubles guy though, he hit 30+ only thrice.)

lotta guys have been position players + played football: deion, brian jordan, bo, lol tebow; could maybe have had kyler murray and russell wilson were the nfl not so much more lucrative for QBs

lotta guys have been position players + played hoops: ainge, groat, gwynn, strawberry, eric davis, lol jordan

but pitching is a very different skill set. being super-athletic can help you run and dunk or whatever, but it won't help as much in making you a big-league pitcher

milwaukee bucks guard pat connaughton was a fourth-round MLB pick (and likely would have gone in the second had he committed to baseball) and threw 96, which i find extremely interesting

and tom glavine was taken higher in the NHL draft than hall-of-famer luc robitaille, which is fucking crazy

i think those last two guys are more comparable to shohei/ruth than dave winfield is . . . except shohei/ruth actually *did* the two things and connaughton/glavine only *might* have

fwiw gordie howe was supposedly a v. good position player, probably not least because of his fucking enormous forearms

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CkmEkxoVEAAGNhw.jpg

Bob Gibson? Had the pitching stuff figured out...His batting stats (three or four AB per week, probably) aren't great for a non-pitcher, but I get the feeling he could have done whatever he set his mind to. Not saying Ohtani-level, but I think he could have been successful as a two-way player.

One thing in that Winfield tweet I disagree with is "but teams didn't have the vision back then." Are there other teams trying this now? It seems that one team has the vision/nerve/whatever to try it. It worked out so spectacularly well, they're probably going to lose the player.

I wonder if Ohtani is analogous in a way to Jackie Robinson. Ohtani's experiment obviously isn't as soul-crushing and ultimately as heroic as Robinson's, but one thing most everyone would agree on is that there were other Black players just as amazing as Robinson or Mays or Aaron who simply never got the chance (or, like Paige, only briefly got the chance, long after the fact). Baseball made a decision after Ruth that you had to be a pitcher or a position player. So you can say that Ohtani is this singular player that comes along once every 100 years, and there's no way to refute that. But if other teams are trying this in the low minors right now (or start to after this season), 10 or 15 years from now there might be another Ohtani, leaving people to wonder why there was an unwritten rule against two-way players for a century.

"vision/nerve/whatever"--being the Angels, add "desperation."

Last thing: the truism that in high school, most major leaguers were the best hitter/pitcher/fielder/everything on their team.

yeah coming from outside the draft, ohtani had unusual leverage in forcing a team to let him do both. that's a labor issue

hunter greene could have done both, but the reds made him concentrate on pitching because he can throw 100+. and the financial incentives encouraged him to follow along

But if other teams are trying this in the low minors right now (or start to after this season), 10 or 15 years from now there might be another Ohtani, leaving people to wonder why there was an unwritten rule against two-way players for a century.

The Giants, last year drafted Reggie Crawford as a two-way player with their first pick. This year they took Bryce Eldridge, 16th overall, as another two-way player.

Okay, didn't know that.

https://www.mlb.com/news/bryce-eldridge-ready-for-mlb-draft-as-two-way-player

I find the 3.50 ERA a little puzzling: lowest H/9 in the league, 11.9 K/9, and while his control isn't great, his K/BB ratio is 3.00, and even into the '80s and '90s that was still excellent. (Clemens for his career: 2.96.) I guess it's the home runs: 14 in 105.1 innings, a rate about four or five times what league leader Sonny Gray's is. Not sure why that is.

I guess it's the home runs...

ya think?

The "not sure why that is" was more important. If you have that much stuff, and you're wild enough that (presumably) batters can't dig in--I can sort of understand why Verlander gives up a lot of homers--why does he give so many up?