Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1201: The Shohei Ohtani Reappreciation Pod

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a walk-off popup, a weekend brawl, booing Giancarlo Stanton, Bryce Harper’s hot start and Byron Buxton’s slow (but not slowest) start, Xander Bogaerts, and Ian Happ, and then do a deep dive on Shohei Ohtani’s past, present, and future as a hitter and pitcher and the wonder of […]

You, you have your own special way I'm turning the world to its face in the way that I'm going Don't ever, don't ever stop Hello and welcome to episode 1201 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. I'm not going to mince words here.

We're going to talk about Shohei Otani a lot on this podcast. I think I'm not tired of talking about him yet. I hope listeners aren't tired of not tired of talking about him yet. I hope listeners aren't tired of listening to us talk about him yet. In fact, I have some stats. I don't know whether our listeners overlap with Fangraph's reading audience precisely, but I'm sure there's considerable overlap. And Sean Delanar from Fangraphs was just telling me that so far this season, so since March 29th, Shohei Otani is not only the most popular player page at Fangraphs, he is the most popular player page by 5.3 times.

Now that's double counting his hitting page and his pitching page, which are split roughly evenly in terms of traffic to those pages. So if you want to just count that as one fine he still has like 2.7 times as much traffic to his player page as any other player does and so i got notes from multiple editors at the ringer this weekend saying essentially we can't cover otani too much we can't over cover otani Not in like a cynical traffic grab sort of way, although I assume that Otani pieces do well right now and that's a consideration. But just because he really is legitimately that interesting and a sensation and there's so much to say about him and I don't feel like he has been overhyped. I feel like he has been hyped appropriately.

like he has been overhyped. I feel like he has been hyped appropriately. So we will get to that shortly. But there was other weirdness and notable stuff that happened this weekend that we can at least touch on before that. And one weird event that I was watching live on Saturday night was the game between the Astros and the Padres. And you had told me on our last show of last week that the Padres were off to a lousy start this season. I hadn't really been following them that well. And so I essentially had my opinion not changed by you telling me how poorly the Padres had been doing to start the season. But if I had seen the final play of Saturday's game,

that alone might have changed my opinion about the Padres. There was a walk-off infield fly ball slash pop-up. And it dropped behind Eric Hosmer, who was paid a lot of money in large part because the team thinks that he's better at defense and the numbers say that he is. Now, look, everybody has misplayed a pop-up at some point. I get it. I've never fielded a sky-high major league pop-up. I've never had to do it. I was a pitcher.

Pitchers aren't supposed to catch those things for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, but I was happy to back off. I didn't really care. Leaves the blame to somebody else. It's just a fluke misplay, but it is maybe, it's one of the worst ways to lose.

Look, we could have a whole conversation. Maybe Friday's podcast will be, let's talk about all the worst ways to lose a baseball game but yeah i was trying i don't know if you did the same thing but i went to the play index and tried to find examples of other walk-off pop-ups and all of the walk-off pop-ups i could find and there are some there there are other ones there was even one last season and it came between the a's and the yankees but that was a pop-up that was behind the infield so So those are a lot more understandable. I found one where like Joey Votto and Jay Bruce and some other Reds couldn't make a catch on a pop-up by Brian McCann off for all this Chapman

in 2014, won the game in the Yankee stadium, but that was also behind a first base. The wind was swirling. It makes a little more sense. Whereas this was Eric Hosmer charging at the ball. You think he would be easier to catch a ball in front of you. The ball dropped about 20 feet away from home plate. So it is not the first walk-off pop-up in even recent baseball history. But it is the worst walk-off pop-up I could find in recent baseball history in that all of the other ones I kind of get. When an infielder is running backwards, that's a hard play. This is not a hard play. when an infielder is running backwards that's a hard play this yeah this is not a hard play yeah i know there was some debate about whose fault it was or whose fault it was the most

because i think just about anyone on that side of the infield could have and perhaps should have caught the ball but i think it's probably hasmer's fault the most that maybe he thought that the catcher was going to catch it maybe there was a failure of calling the play and assigning responsibility there. But it was an easier play for Hosmer, who was coming in on the ball and had a good view of it, theoretically, than it would have been for the catcher, who would have been all turned around and looking over his neck. So if we want to pin the blame primarily on someone, I suppose it would be Hosmer. But kind of a group effort failure on a play like that and this was a game so the podgers lost to the this was the only run of the game

which makes it all the worse yes uh afters beat the podgers one nothing and this is a game where uh the podger starter brian mitchell technically this is his line 5.2300610 you think wow that's a lot of strikeouts no six walks six walks one strikeout i've been really interested in brian mitchell in the i let me i'm going to walk that back i've been modestly interested in brian mitchell he's no show hey oh donnie but mitchell is a guy that the padres essentially bought from the yankees this was one of the examples provided for when a team has bought a player a young player they they got m got Mitchell for the cost of basically absorbing Chase Headley's contract. That is not controversial.

That is exactly what the Padres did because they wanted to see what Brian Mitchell could do as a starter. And so far, he's started two games. He's got a 4.22 ERA. Whatever. That's fine. 10.2 innings. Nine walks, one strikeout. I can tell you right now, based on those numbers, he's not going to be a good starter.

It's over. It's's not going to be a good starter. It's over. It's just not going to work. He's thrown 54% strikes. He's got, like, no swinging strikes. It's just this is, like we were talking about recently, this is just one of those indicator numbers where you don't need a big sample to know that, nope, this is just you. We already know.

This is a failure. And similar to how we can already say about Chris Tillman with Baltimore, I don't know if you've looked at this. You probably haven't because who wants to look up Chris Tillman? Probably right now not even Chris Tillman. 9.1 innings and two starts, 15 hits, nine runs, eight walks, three strikeouts. Is he fixed? No.

Chris Tillman not fixed at all. Orioles in trouble. Yeah, and you could say small sample, and it is, but if you take a good pitcher, you could look up probably any random stretch of that many innings or that many batters faced, and you still wouldn't find a stretch in a good season where someone had a strikeout-to-walk ratio like that. That's just saying unsustainable is putting it too lightly. So, yeah, that's not a good sign. But, yeah, that Padres play was depressing. It kind of reminded me in a way of that famous Astros play

that is, you know, the gif is still floating around the internet of the one where, what year was it? 2013-ish? It was every year. The Astros had their loads. Yeah, but that one particular play

where they were just throwing the ball all over the infield and missing it in a very Keystone Cops kind of fashion, this was that except with fewer people involved in the play and primarily responsible for the play, which maybe made it worse in a way anyway, not to make too much of one play. But ultimately, if you want to boil down what this season is likely to be like for the Padres, that would be a pretty good standard. And I believe they also have now lost Kirby Yates to injury, which doesn't really mean anything to most of you, because again, who cares? But he's one of their good relievers, and it looks like he's out now.

So just getting worse, only getting worse. All right. We also had a brawl. There was a brawl involving Yadier Molina, Tori Lovello, the Diamondbacks manager. Heated words were exchanged. Blows were sort of kind of exchanged. Not really. It's a baseball brawl.

But do you have any thoughts on what happened here? Okay. So I didn't watch this as it happened, but I have been reading about it because you mentioned it to me. I heard about it. I wasn't that interested in it at first because no one really did anything. It seemed like, oh, Yadier Molina took offense to something again. That's kind of his thing. But what it seems like, enough people linked to me.

There were some really weird-ass ball strike calls this weekend in the Cardinals Diamondbacks series. Real bad ones, I'm sure. I'll be writing about them at some point because they were legendarily bad. But it seems like Tori Lavello had Lavello, Lavello. It's spelled Lavello, but I think it's Lavello. Tori, Lavello. Correct me if I'm wrong, Tori. Come on the pod.

We'll talk about your ejection. So it seems like he came out. He had already been ejected. He was complaining about balls and strikes. That's a no-no. This is extra innings, right? And it seems as if he'd been talking with the umpire in a heated way and was making conversation not with Yadier Molina,

but about Molina and talking about how it seemed like Molina was getting more strikes than was deserved, which immediately that's funny, coming from the manager of Jeff Mathis. And this is just this is baseball strategy. So just let it go. Anyway, your team benefits from this too and the games that Alex Avila doesn't start. But it seems like he was referring to Molina as an MRF-er, which he which he said a few times. And I'll read you the first paragraph here from Joe Trez's article at MLB.com. Short paragraph. D-backs manager Tori Lavella doesn't deny using the vulgar word that set Yadier Molina off and sparked a benches-clearing incident Sunday at Busch Stadium.

But Lavella said Molina misread his intent, which was not personal. Yeah, you can't call a guy an MRF-er twice on the field within hearing range and say it's not personal. I understand that Lavella might have let his temper get the best of him in fact he definitely did and i think that he's admitted that but yeah you uh maybe maybe you expect someone to just be able to let that roll off his shoulders but if you've spent any amount of time watching or reading about yadi or melina you know it's it's not going to just roll off his back he's going to take it, and that is a direct personal insult, even if it was not necessarily intended that way.

Lovello, in the wrong here. Usually I take the side against the person who emotionally overreacts, but I get it. I understand this one. Yeah. Another notable thing from this weekend, John Carlos Stanton struck out five times in a game again. I was on Hang Up and Listen on Monday morning, and we talked about three topics. Otani, which we'll be talking about in a second, we've been talking about all year. Gabe Kapler, which we've been talking about all year. And

John Carlos Stanton, which really we haven't talked about this season, because really, there's no reason to talk about John Carlos Stanton. But lots of people are talking about him or more accurately booing him if they're in New York. And it's very silly, I think. It's not unexpected for a hitter who is failing in sort of an obvious way, at least within individual games, to be booed, especially while the rest of the team is struggling and the Yankees have had some tough losses in both games and injury-wise. They've also had their vaunted bullpen come up short a couple times and blow leads. So it's been a rough stretch for the Yankees.

I know everyone sympathetic to the Yankees' plight. But John Carl Stanton is not really the reason for that any more than anyone else. His line is strange, certainly. As we speak, he's batting.167, I think, and slugging 429. But if you look at it as a whole, he's basically been a league average hitter. He has a 98 WRC+. He has homered three times. He's doubled a couple times.

Ironically, when he hit two homers on opening day, everyone was saying, oh, the weight is off his back and the pressure is off now and the narrative that he can't succeed with the Yankees or whatever. He won't have to worry about that. Well, now he suddenly has to worry about that. But it's extremely silly, obviously. This is a case where a small sample should really just be disregarded. Yes, he struck out a bunch, but everyone has struck out a bunch this season. He's still hitting for power.

He's going to be fine. It'll just take three good games for his numbers to look like they usually look. And he's, I don't know whether it's fair to say that he is habitually a slow starter, but April slash March has been his worst month historically. He's going to be fine, folks. And unless this snowballs in some way where it really gets ugly and he hates New York and New York hates him, there's just absolutely nothing to worry about here

and it's very silly that he is being booed at all. I mean, my philosophy about booing, obviously you buy a ticket, you're entitled to make whatever noises you want within reason, I suppose, and booing is an acceptable noise at baseball games. I've never booed. I just don't really have the temperament or the personality to boo. I don't make a lot of noise in general, but it just always seemed counterproductive because it's like, why do you need to express disapproval?

The player knows he's not doing something well. It's only going to make him feel worse probably and potentially press and play even worse, I guess. If the player is just not trying and it's obvious that he's not giving his full effort, maybe you could say that chastising him for that could be a corrective kind of measure. But otherwise, if it's just a guy striking out because he's a high strikeout slugger, I never really understood the point of booing. It's just kind of this mob mentality type thing. I'm going to protest this talking point.

People are talking about John Carlos Stanton because he's striking out. I don't care. Yeah. No, neither do I. It's a very popular talking point. But if anyone is actually worried legitimately worried about John Carlston I see no reason to yet in fact his contact rate despite his strikeout rate being up his contact rate is barely below what it usually is or at least his outside of the zone swing rate

his chase rate barely below his career average this is just too small a sample to concern yourself with such things yep you have anything else no not really i mean there's besides otani which is going to be the entirety of this podcast and all subsequent podcasts also mike tried hit a home run but then i mean there's what there's just things like garrett cole seems like he's better now which is only kind of interesting because everyone expected he would be which is also interesting because it was only a few years ago that we were all talking about how the pirates were on the cutting edge but then all of a sudden someone had to leave the pirates to get better but i don't know if that's even necessarily something that's that interesting but in the early going it

does indeed it seems like the asters have garrett cole throwing not necessarily fewer fastballs but fewer sinkers why throw fewer sinkers because hitters like sinkers. So that's basically it. But also he just dominated the Padres, which doesn't really count for reasons already discussed in this podcast. Eric Hosmer's ground ball rate is 57%. Yeah, and Bryce Harper is the best hitter in baseball, non-D.D. Gregorius division. So that's exciting, but not surprising.

I'll say this. I will counter the Gianan carlos stanton conversation point which i understand you're in new york i don't know if that means that you were more vulnerable than most to uh being aware of the new york area talking points but anyway you're in new york people are complaining about jean carlos stanton who's great i think this one has gotten a little quieter but so far byron buxton batting 185, slugging 222. His WRC Plus is 5. He's got zero walks.

He's got nine strikeouts. I don't know if anyone's paying attention to that one, but Byron Buxton is maybe never going to just normalize, just find a level. He's always going to—he's going to be 36 years old. He's going to be the best defensive center fielder in baseball, best base runner. And then for the first half, he's going to bat like 140, and everyone's going to say, I don't know if he's going to be the best defensive center fielder in baseball best base runner and then for the first half he's going to bat like 140 and everyone's going to say i don't know if he's going to figure it out and then the second half he's going to like have an ops of 833 everyone's going to say look out byron buxton breakout candidate in his age 37 season in

whatever year that is like 2029 well he hasn't dug as deep a hole as he did at the start of last season i guess what was he hitting like on this date last year or at an equivalent point of last season, which I suppose started a little later? I mean, not only was he not hitting, but he was not making contact with the baseball, and it was dire. And that was before we saw him have the second half of last season that he had, so we know now that he's capable of that kind of performance yeah and as long as we are talking about breakout candidates or non-breakout

candidates uh here's a fun fact from early reese hoskins who uh last year had a grand ball rate of 31 so far this season 10 10 grand balls reese hoskins hitting everything in the air hitting i don't know, everything hard. What's he doing? Yeah, he's batting 440. He's pretty good. Reese Hoskins is pretty good. So Buxton has played seven games through his first seven games last year.

He was hitting 069, not nice, 100 OBP, and 103 slugging with 17 strikeouts in 29 at-bats. It's better. Improvement. This is the Byron Buxton first week of April breakout, relatively speaking. Sticking with, I guess, some early numbers, we do have Ian Happ who still, I mean, it takes a while for these things to get back to normal, but Ian Happ has batted 30 times so far this season.

He struck out 17 times. That's too many. That's 57% strikeouts. He's got five hits, one home run. This is a guy who had one of the biggest springs, or at least it seemed like he had one of the bigger springs. I don't really know what wound up happening. But if you need further evidence, spring training is stupid

and a waste of everyone's time. Ian Happ was great. Shohei Otani was terrible on both sides of the ball. Doesn't seem to matter. Shohei Otani is the best player in the world. of a sudden non-teammate division and I don't usually I don't care about barrels so much as like a stat cast statistic you know because uh I figure what's the difference between a barrel and a home run basically we already have a we already have a word for this it's home run but I did uh i have enjoyed that zander bogarts has already tied his 2017 number of barrels uh six he's got two home runs this year which whatever that's fine he hit 10 last year but

zander bogarts is batting 368 he's slugging 711 he's hitting the ball really hard he was supposed to hit the ball really hard when he was coming up through the minors and he's had a weirdly valuable major league career but there was all this talk that Bogarts is playing through injury last season. I have no reason to doubt that. Now, unfortunately, he is injured again in a different way, but the fact that he's already caught up to last year's number of bearers, that actually is pretty cool to me, and his grand ball rate has plummeted from last year's rate of 49%.

It is lower now. He's trying to be a powerheader. Yeah, Bogarts is really good, and he was kind of a popular breakout pick, I guess you could say, before the season. One of those guys who just on principle, I refuse to call a breakout pick just because he already has been so good. Like 2013 to 2017, Bogarts was the, let's see, eighth most valuable shortstop in Major League Baseball. He was really good. But, of course, a lot of that was just his position and his defense and his base running. League average hitter over that span.

So I guess it's fair to call him a breakout candidate if you think he's going to take a big step forward offensively. And he was playing at a breakout type pace last year before he got hit on the hand or the wrist. And then he tried to play through it for the rest of the season and his power sort of evaporated from there. So it was easy to project that you could just kind of extrapolate his pre-hit by pitch numbers over a full season and he'd be really good again. And that does seem to be what's happening now. And the Red Sox are off to an excellent start in part because of Bogarts being great and hopefully not being seriously injured now. But yeah, that's been nice to see. So we've been stalling here as a way of not dwelling entirely on Shohei Otani. I don't want to wear

out the topic of Otani because we do have a whole season ahead of us. And of course, we've talked about him plenty already. But I just don't know that there has been a more compelling player-focused story in baseball the whole time I've been following the sport. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but I've certainly seen better players or more valuable players or at least better and more valuable than we can say with any certainty that Otani is. I mean, we've seen Bonds be the best hitter ever. We've seen Roger Clemens at the end of maybe the best pitching career ever.

We've seen the Sosa-McGuire home run race. We've seen Ichiro set hits records. Sosa-McGuire home run race. We've seen Ichiro set hits records. We've seen Bryce Harper be hotter than any hitter has ever been over a period in 2015. We've seen Kershaw and Trout and all these guys get off to historic starts, poo holes, etc. I don't know that I've ever just been as delighted by a player, at least early in his career, as I am by Otani. And he's really just fulfilled every fantasy that we had about him in a period of about 10 days, which doesn't mean that he will continue to fulfill those fantasies, but he has essentially provided the proof of concept. We now know that he can do what we've dreamed about him being capable of doing.

And the history of Otani on this podcast goes back quite a ways. I was recently hit to the fact by the Effectively Wild Wiki project that the first time Otani was mentioned on this podcast was all the way back in episode 350. That's December 2013 he was mentioned. Sam and I were interviewing Jason Koskari, who was and is a baseball writer for the Japan Times. And we had him on at the time to talk about Masahiro Tanaka, who was just being posted at the time. He was the one who was causing the latest craze about an NPB player. And we asked at the tail end of that episode, who's next, essentially, who's the next NPB player who will cause this kind of craze? And one of the players that Jason mentioned way back then was Shohei Otani.

And ironically, Jason said, and I'm quoting here, he was talking about how he was pitching and hitting. And he said, quote, eventually he'll pick one of those, hopefully, and he'll be really good at it. Well, he never picked one of them. He kept doing both and got great at both of them. And at the time, it was weird and cool that Otani was doing what he was doing, but he was coming off his age 18 rookie season in NPB. He was doing it all. He pitched in 13 games. He played 54 games in the

outfield. He made more than 200 plate appearances, but he wasn't really great at any of those things. It was impressive that he was just holding his own at all as a rookie and as an 18-year-old and as a two-way player, but he had a higher than average ERA, a lower than average OPS. It was not at all clear that he would go on to be great at all of these things. And obviously he has, and we've been following him throughout the years, particularly in 2016, when he just became the best hitter and best pitcher in Japan and had a 10 plus war season in a league that has 143 game schedule. That was, I think, when really the anticipation ramped up. And I think it was episode 650, maybe we had Jason on again. No, it was 921,

quite a ways later that we had Jason on again to just talk exclusively about Otani. Anyway, we've been daydreaming about this guy and salivating over his stats for years at this point. And how many times does the hype for something like that actually live up to the billing? I mean, the player actually vindicates all the anticipation. It's kind of incredible because over these past few years, we've thought, well, maybe he won't be posted, especially when the new CBA was put in place and we learned that he just wouldn't make any money if he came over before he was 25. So there was uncertainty about whether he'd come over at all. Then there was the scare about his elbow and maybe he's hurt and he missed a lot of time last season as it was. And then there were the spring training struggles this year and people talking about whether he'd start the season in AAA. And then here we are, and he's doing things that we have never seen done and haven't been done for a century. Okay.

I don't want Shohei Otani to retire today. However, if he did, he would already be a baseball legend because he, just for the fact of having met the hype and taking a perfect game through 19 batters after homering in three consecutive games, including his first game at home. His first start against the A's was good. He had a good game, but because of the home run, the three-run home run that he allowed,

the final numbers didn't look super impressive. They just looked good. And now he was dominant. So now you're looking at a guy who's got a bunch of strikeouts, barely any walks, and he's great on both sides. He's obviously the Angels leader in pitching war, and he's tied for team lead in hitting war, which is exactly what everyone's fantasy of Shohei Ohtani was going to be, tied with Mike Trapp in position player war. That's pretty good.

Yeah. But the problem, I guess, if there is a problem, you still, because it is only weekend, we were all prepared to say that if otani had a bad week or a bad week and a half just like spring training well it's not going to matter he's still getting used to it he's still adjusting and then we you have to give him at least the first half you have to give him at least a full season and you know this is i have to imagine he's not going to finish with a wrc plus of 278 he's probably not going to finish with a well he could finish with any area of 2.08 i really don't's super good. Yeah. And he pitched so well against the A's.

Even, again, without really having a very good slider, he was just a two-pitch pitcher for the most part against the A's. And he was completely dominant. But the fact that he has exactly met the hype of being fantastic, absolutely fantastic, arguably the best on both sides, it almost unfortunately validates the impossible standards that we put on players like i shouldn't say players like this but any the next exciting player who comes up we expect amazing things and then when you have someone who actually meets it that's great it's not like anyone is just saying well of course he's doing this this is exactly what we thought because i think that when we set those impossible standards at the same time we're

we're acknowledging like well they're not going to meet them so we're just setting ourselves up to be disappointed but we're still setting ourselves up to be disappointed and now we're going to be more likely to hold the next player to the same kinds of standards which isn't really fair but i guess bad news next amazing 18 year old japanese position player pitcher hybrid that we're going to see come over in five years. We're going to do the same thing. Maybe we'll expect even more. Yeah, I think back to how excited I was for like Pat Vendetti or Christian Bethencourt. And I feel sorry for myself back then getting excited about those players when they were

just pale shadows of what we're watching now. And I mean, I don't even know. The stats are so impressive that it's hard to know which one to cite. But I'll say that, you know, and I wrote this in a just sort of general appreciation of his recent performance for The Ringer in an article that's up now, he was worth one war over this past week. So he had a one war week, and it's maybe hard to know how impressive that is. Obviously, it's impressive because if you prorate that over a full season, it would be by far the best season ever. So it's impressive, but it's not like unheard of or unprecedented. I had Fangraph's founder and proprietor, David Appelman, look up one war weeks for me. Now, it's kind of hard to do this because war isn't really designed to be a daily or a weekly stat.

So he had to strip out defense for one thing, which is kind of okay because Otani didn't play defense during this week. But between that and also it's just hard to look up like a span of any seven days, like any week-long span. So he did it like week splits like basically monday through sunday so if you were to look at any span of seven days there would be more one war weeks but going back to 2002 which is as far back as he could go there have been 13 one war weeks by 10 individual pitchers so that's less than one per season, and 68

one-war weeks by 57 individual position players, so that's about four one-war weeks. So that's pretty impressive on a per-season basis. It's not common. It's something that doesn't happen all the time, And obviously, Otani had his one-war week in a completely different fashion from anyone else. So every pitcher who made that list made two starts in that week. Every position player who made that list both didn't DH, played an actual position, and played at least six games and got at least 21 plate appearances, whereas Otani in this week played three games as a DH, got 14 plate appearances, and started one game as a pitcher.

So he did it completely differently from anyone else does it, and that's the potential of Otani. That's what he can, in theory, do in one week. One week not even playing as much as he potentially could, but taking it easy on him, starting him once in that week and giving him the buffer, the's kind of a demonstration of what he can do not what he will do every week obviously but what he can do what he did do in one of the most entertaining weeks i can remember and he just totally like made angels games and specifically his outings and plate appearances appointment viewing for me. Like this early in the season, especially, I don't usually plan what game I'm going to watch or like look at the lineups ahead of time. If anything, I have baseball on in the background and I'm just sort of letting it wash over me.

But this year I've been looking up Angels lineups hours in advance. I've been tuning in in time for first pitch. I've been following on at bat when I'm not watching. And of course, it sweetens the deal that I get to watch Trout and I get to watch Simmons and maybe I get to watch Garrett Richards and the rest of a pretty entertaining team on days when I'm watching Otani. But Otani is the highlight for me. Even with Trout on the same team, I'm kind of like, all right, let's get through these at bats. Just get on base or make an out or whatever you're going to do. Get me back to the Otani spot in the lineup, please. And you can already see how much Otani beans the Angels because they're 7-3, I think. 7-3,

they're sort of keeping up with the Astros, but they've won both of Otani's starts. He's been the best hitter on the team. 5-1 in Otani games. Yeah. 5-1 in Otani games. The one loss was an extra inning game. So yeah. You feel so bad. So on Sunday, the recorded attendance in Angel Stadium was 44,742. That's Otani, of course,

pitching against the A's. And on Saturday, when Otani did not play, the recorded attendance was 40,129. No meaningful difference. It's 4,000 fewer people or so. But you feel bad for those 40,000 people plus who bought tickets

and didn't get to see shohei otani at all they showed up to see jeffrey marte and jc ramirez on the mound but you look at where the angels are now not only has otani clearly been a huge boost but ian kinsler is on the disabled list now he's going to be back shortly but andrew haney is on the disabled list with elbow problem doesn't they don't know when he's coming back jc ramirez was recently placed on the disabled list with an elbow problem matt shoemaker was recently placed on the disabled list with a forearm problem which is an elbow problem so the angels have three of their starting pitchers already on the disabled list and that's bad this is exactly what people figured

would be the downfall of the angels with or without Otani, but they just don't have reliable pitching health. They're already down three, not even counting Alex Meyer, who's been out for the season for a long time because of some other health problem. But the Angels have lost three starting pitchers to the disabled list and their quality second baseman to the disabled list. And I don't know if anyone's noticed because shohei otani has been playing also mike drought also andrelton simmons also the others but otani's been there and it's kept the angels afloat even though they've got three pitchers on the dl and parker

bridwell and his one start lasted an inning and two thirds allowing six runs with three home runs allowed era of 32.4 i kind of feel bad forout that it's taken Otani coming along to draw this attention to the Angels because Trout obviously is better. He's the best player in baseball. He got off to the best start of any career ever. So in his own way, he's as singular as Otani is. And everyone should have been watching Mike Trout all this time, too. And now you see Trout, like, in his postgame interview yesterday, following a big game for Trout all this time too. And now you see Trout, like in his post-game interview yesterday, following a big game for Trout. He homered, he singled, he walked, he supplied a

lot of the run support that Otani needed. And Trout, the first two questions he got in his post-game sideline interview were about Otani. Like, what is it like to watch Otani? What is it like to be Otani's teammate? It's kind of unfair in a way. I mean, I'm happy that people are getting to see Trout, even if he's not really in the spotlight right now. But it is sort of sad that it took this other superhero coming along to be Trout's sidekick, in essence, to actually draw attention to the Angels. I mean at this point people know who Mike Trout is it's not like he's flying under the radar at all he's been the best player in baseball for six years right six plus yeah essentially so everyone already is familiar

with Mike Trout he's had some national ad campaigns but I wonder if Shohei Otani being on the team will in a way just increase Trout's exposure and make him more popular increase obviously the Angels brand but all those games that people are going to be watching the angels they're going to see these other players and i i would be really interested to know and we'll never have this data but to see the local ratings for like tv ratings for otani games and non-otani games because i wonder if people are going to be paying that close attention or if they'll just be like oh the angels are on maybe otani's going to play and they'll just have the game on because i know the Angels have always played a little bit of second fiddle down there. They're still more broadly appreciated than the Padres for a variety of reasons.

But, you know, they've had that little rivalry, little spat with the Dodgers, and they're not the Dodgers. But people are having trouble watching the Dodgers on TV, and people are going to be looking for the Angels. So this is going to be very good for them for on-field and off-the-field reasons. But, yeah, now Mike Trout gets to be humbled. He gets to face all the questions about a teammate like all his teammates have been facing about him for the last six years.

Yeah. I have a box of Trout-branded super pretzels in my freezer right now, and I've been looking forward to Trout getting maybe a sexier sponsorship one of these days, but I don't know that that's happened yet. I guess he has some others. But yeah, I've tried to get MLB TV data, viewership data in the past, like in Vin Scully's final season, I was trying to wheedle some MLB TV data out of MLB Advanced Media to try to get a sense of like, how many non-Dodgers fans were tuning in to listen to Scully or what percentage of people who were watching Dodgers games were listening to the Scully feed as opposed to the other feeds never succeeded in getting that data. Maybe I'll try again with Otani, probably unsuccessfully, but yeah. I would love to find out the least watched game of the season. Now that's probably data

they wouldn't want to release because they're all about promoting their own brand. But I mean, if we, okay, if you had to, if you had to guess, it wouldn't be any, it wouldn't want to release because they're all about promoting their own brand but i mean if we okay if you had to if you had to guess it wouldn't be any it wouldn't be the final game of the season right for anyone because people are gonna tune in just like we're gonna miss baseball but it would be one of the final games of the season yeah probably i assume yeah it would have to be like what a marlins game or a raise game or something after they've been eliminated maybe mid-september with no one interesting starting september call-ups all over the lineup that kind of thing okay okay i'm gonna check this out so the marlins final series of the year that's against the mets so people are going to be i'm looking for a total viewership on both sides so mets fans likely to be

tuning in so i don't think that's going to be it but if you check out the hmm the reds their final series pirates that's a candidate that's a that's a possibility there could be looking at the uh the friday game reds pirates but the tigers closed with the look okay i could do this all day i'm not going to do this anymore but i would uh i'd love to find out i guess we'll never know yeah so speaking of where the angels playoff odds stack up right now even with the 7-3 start they are roughly 40 to make the playoffs most of that obviously tied up in the wild card so they need every they need every win, and that is going to make how they handle Otani more interesting. We touched on this in the last episode, but if he continues to be excellent, not one-war-a-week excellent, but hitting well, pitching well, hitting better

than the alternatives, it will be really fascinating to see if they crack, if they bend at all, if they stray from their preseason rest schedule, which frankly, maybe they shouldn't. I don't know. They have him under contract for several years. They have to consider that. They have to consider that there may be some amount of damage in his elbow, as was revealed by a report last year. Don't want to push him too hard, especially in his first season playing in the majors and all the pressure and the different ball and the different schedule and all the rest of it. So maybe they should be responsible and stick to what they're doing. On the other hand, if we get, say, halfway through the season and he's showing no ill effects and no signs of fatigue and he's been considerably better than their other options, I really wonder whether they will start pushing it. And obviously, tiny, tiny sample, but in the Angels' 10 games so far, the Angels' 10 games so far, in the four games with Otani as DH, their DHs, namely Otani,

have been worth about four batting runs above average. In the six games where Otani has not DH'd. So Pujols or Chris Young has DH'd. They've been negative three batting runs out of the DH slot. So tiny sample, not necessarily going to continue to be that way. But it is likely, I would say, that Otani will be better than the other hitters in those lineup slots. So you just wonder whether the temptation will at some point overcome them. And maybe you just start him, you know, the day after he pitches or the day before he pitches, you give him some DH activity.

Maybe, maybe you consider DHing him on the days that he pitches. I don't know whether that makes any sense. It kind of depends. If he continues to be as good at pitching as he has been thus far, and he continues to go deep into games, obviously they're not going to be pushing him pitch count-wise, but he got through seven innings throwing only 91 pitches in his most recent start.

If he goes seven, if he goes seven regularly, then in theory you could just sacrifice the DH slot, have him start at DH or have him hit for himself on those days and maybe end up being better because you only have to get perhaps one plate appearance out of the pitcher slot and you could just pinch hit for him and maybe it won't hurt you at all so it's something they can consider doing it wouldn't be a big edge or anything but at some point it's going to be more and more tempting if he keeps up any approximation of what he's been doing so far i wonder if the bigger struggle might even end up being the six-man rotation idea because they are already without ramirez shoemaker and and meyer Haney, and Bridwell is not very good. And I mean, look, Tyler Skaggs has already had Tommy John surgery. Garrett Richards had stem cell treatment for his elbow problem, which clearly hasn't completely taken for JC Ramirez.

So the Angels do not have a whole lot of rotation depth. They opened with like nine candidates, but they're already down several of them. And I would imagine that they've had a stricter schedule worked out for Otani from the beginning saying like we're going to keep you on a six-man rotation as much as we possibly can but this it's going to get hard it could I should say get hard on both sides of of the game where you want him to bat more and maybe you think well batting is is lower impact so he can dh and and maybe it's easier for them to try to squeeze out a few more at-bats there, but there could easily come a point in the year where they think, well, Otani looks fresh every game he starts,

and he's really good, and he's the only healthy one that we have, so let's just keep using him. And I cannot get over the fact that we're having this conversation two weeks after people are having the conversation of whether he should begin in AAA because his spring training was so bad. Spring training doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. And we fall for it every year. At least some of us do. We always look for some sort of signal. It's not there. It's nonsense. Yeah, for the most part. I mean, at the very margins, if you look at the right stats, there's some signal there, but it's tough to detect. And I mean, I the very margins, if you look at the right stats, there's some signal there,

but it's tough to detect. I mean, I won't say that his tough spring training didn't make me slightly more worried or more pessimistic than I was. I mean, I think it did, barely. I mean, I picked him to be the rookie of the year, so I wasn't especially concerned. But, you know, my expectations coming into February were maybe a little bit higher than they were after he had a 347 OPS in spring training and a 27 ERA or whatever it was, if only because you start worrying that maybe it's just going to add to the pressure that he's facing and that's going to affect his performance in some way. But, you know, I mean, to, to read, there's a ridiculous Mike and the Mad Dog exchange where they're talking about this shortly before opening day and saying the Yankees are lucky that they didn't get him. It's just so preposterous, but I don't know. I mean, I think that the jury is still out to some extent on his hitting. We know that he has the power to be an excellent hitter. He's

still one of only 18 players to have hit at least two balls 112 miles per hour, and he's done that in only four games as a hitter, whereas other guys have had eight, nine, ten at this point. And only Miguel Sano has the higher average exit speed among hitters with at least 10 batted balls. He hits the ball hard. We know that. I think there's still perhaps some question about how opposing pitchers will adjust to him. He has shown some willingness to swing at pitches outside the strike zone. Maybe through some combination of exploiting that tendency and respecting his power, pitchers will stay away even more than they have. and we don't know exactly how he'll adjust to that.

So I think there's still some unknown. We still don't know whether he'll be a star-level hitter. But pitching-wise, I mean, the stuff is so incredible that I don't care if it's a small sample. No one throws harder than he does. No starting pitcher. I guess Luis Severino is essentially tied to this point in average velocity, but the weapon that his splitter is is just,

I mean, among pitches that have been thrown at least 10 times this season, the only one that has a higher miss per pitch rate than Otani's splitter is Edwin Diaz's slider. And of course, Edwin Diaz is a reliever. He doesn't have to throw as many types of pitches and fool guys and see guys multiple times in an outing. So he has an advantage there. It's just such a weapon. And I just don't really feel like it's something that hitters can adjust to to that great an extent. Like, yes, it's often out of the strike zone. And so in theory, you can say, well, they can just decide not to swing. They can just recognize that it's a splitter and lay off and it'll be a ball most of the time, which is similar to what people have been saying about Masahiro Tanaka for a few years now. And it's

just harder to do than it is to say because it doesn't look like a splitter. That's the whole point. It looks like a fastball. And when you throw 99 like Otani does, there's just no time to react. You have to be geared up for that. And the splitter comes in at 89 and it looks the same.

It's in the same tunnel until it gets too close for comfort. And there's just no way to adjust so i don't really see it as like oh hitters are going to adjust to this i mean to some extent maybe but what he's doing doesn't look to me like it's a beatable strategy he's just too good and he hasn't even spotted his slider it hasn't been a good pitch for him yet, but if you look at how the slider moves and how fast it is, it's a Corey Kluber level slider. The movement on the pitch is fantastic, and it's not just Corey Kluber. There's also Marcus Stroman, Yu Darvish, and these other pitchers who have really good sliders, and Otani has gone under it. It's backed up on him a few

too many times. It hasn't been very consistent, and so he's so far been succeeding with his heat and his splitter which are obviously great but if he gets that other pitch going i mean it's just it's over there's nothing that there are a lot of players who have really good stuff but shohei otani just took a perfect game into the seventh inning with two pitches yeah and he has a third one that has the potential to be great so you know that's just something to watch for. He backed away from his slider. He didn't use it a whole lot. It clearly wasn't working for him.

Matt Chapman, I think, hit one pretty well early in the game that was caught by a retreating Justin Upton. So the perfect game nearly ended earlier. But he's got the slider. He just, I don't know if it's a seam thing. I don't want to say that he's still adjusting to the balls because the splitter has been so fantastic. But I remember watching Tanaka's debut in 2014

and just being so excited because people were saying his splitter was one of the best pitches in the world. And it definitely looked like it. Certainly probably the best splitter in the world at that point. And I was thrilled to watch him and document it. And Tanaka was throwing his fastball at 91 yeah and Otani has been blown 100 so it's not even a comparison I don't know what else there is to say you gear up for a hard pitch and then here comes the most impossible pitch to hit in the world maybe one

day Otani will face a team that isn't the A's, but so far he's been good against the A's. Yeah. I mean, Tanaka's splitter has been a really great pitch for him, but he at times has like stopped throwing his fastball, as you've documented in various posts. Like he just realized that it was not a good pitch. It was like at one point wasn't like literally the worst fastball in terms of Fangraph's pitch values. And he just all but abandoned it at a certain point. I mean, Otani's fastball, it may not have an amazing spin rate relative to its speed, but it goes fast enough that coupled with his other arsenal, it just doesn't matter all that much. So I don't know. I just don't foresee him, you know, assuming he's healthy, being solved by the league at any point. So Masahiro Tanaka started two games this season.

And he's, I know nobody's paying attention to Tanaka because there's Zertani. And people only have room in their heart for one Japanese pitcher, not all of the good ones. But two starts for Tanaka, 12 and a third innings pitched, nine hits, 4 runs, 0 walks, 15 strikeouts, but here's the best part. The absolute best part, I think. Masahiro Tanaka, through two starts, has thrown 21% fastballs. He's thrown 43% sliders and 31% splitters.

Splitter rate, a career high. Slider rate, easily a career high. He's mixed in like one cutter. He's thrown a few curveballs, but his fastball rate has gone from 41 percent to 33 to 32 to 28 to 21 percent Masahiro Tanaka's fastball and he actually has two fastballs so he's basically stopped throwing his sinker his four seamer is just there as I don't know a show me pitch but we have all these conversations about pitchers who were supposed to just throw

fewer fastballs and throw more of their best pitch, but not to this extent. This is like his fastball is almost dead. He just doesn't, he might as well not even have one, which is incredible. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, I don't want to belabor the point. Especially among our listeners,

I'm sure there's no one who's overlooking Otani or failing to appreciate the significance of what he's doing here. But I mean, we've just never seen anything like this. Yes, it was one week of being brilliant, but we have not seen anyone do that for one week, any week over the past century.

No one has done the things that he's doing. And it's just been so much fun just to have this be appointment viewing, to have like Twitter and Ringer Slack and the Facebook group just united in watching and discussing Otani's performance when he's on the field in a way that typically those mediums are not until October, until most of the teams are eliminated and everyone's watching the same game. I feel like at this point, we are all watching the same game, at least when Otani is on the field. And I will continue to, as long as he keeps performing anything like this. I can't imagine getting tired of it. I guess

eventually I would in the way that like, you know, as much as I love and appreciate Mike Trout, I wasn't necessarily tuning in to watch every Trout plate appearance last season. I guess by 2022, maybe I won't be watching every Shohei Otani start in plate appearance, even if he's doing what he's doing. player more compelling more entertaining more amazing and this is even being fully aware that this is what he's capable of we knew this we knew he had been the best pitcher and the best hitter simultaneously in a very high level league but actually seeing it happen after all the obstacles and ways that it could have gone wrong in the interim is just a real thrill. So this won't be the last time we talk about it, but I just can't talk about it enough. So when do you think, okay, so today is April 9th. When do you think we will, through no fault of our own slash all fault of our own, start to take Shohei Ohtani for granted?

Give me a date. Yeah. I mean, it's dependent on his performance, obviously. If he slumps, if he stops hitting or something, I guess we won't be taking his performance for granted. He just won't be having the same performance anymore. But if he keeps being an above-average both, an above-average hitter, an above-average pitcher, even a star level, both above average both, an above average hitter and above average pitcher, even a star level, both of those things. I don't think it'll be this season. I think this whole season will be just nonstop sensation and bigger and bigger crowds on the road and ratings and the whole thing. And if he does that, then presumably he will win the Rookie of the Year award, might even be in consideration for an MVP award.

I mean, if he were somehow to be even just an above-average player at both of these things, he'd almost automatically be an MVP candidate if he gets enough playing time. So not this season, not even beginning of next season, but I would say that by middle of next season or so we would be conditioned enough by what otani does that it won't necessarily be like a live look in every day sort of situation okay so uh next question it looks like i don't know exactly how things are going to shake out but otani's next start should come on the road against the royals this coming weekend the angels are in tex Texas for three games,

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So if they stick to their six-man, which they should, then Otani should start Saturday. Yeah, well, I think he's starting just once a week now. I think that's the plan, just every Sunday, according to what I read. It's just like a weekly event. Okay, well, then we'll do that because he started last Sunday. He's starting this Sunday. So let's say he's starting this coming Sunday against the Royals. It will be the fourth game of a four-game series. The Royals have only played two home games this season. In their home opener, they drew 36,500-some people. In the next game, they drew half of that.

They're playing the White Sox, not a big draw. So only those two home games. And last year, I don't know what a good comparison would be, but the Royals' first Sunday home game was oh it's against the angels and they drew just shy of 28 000 people to uh to kaufman stadium and the royals final sunday home game last season last game of the year drew 32 000 try to guess the royals attendance for this coming sunday assuming that's the otani game. Will it be inflated? and all the rest of it. So yeah, I would say that if you could somehow take that into account, there would be like a measurable Otani bump.

I don't know that it would be enough to overcome just other reasons why people might be staying away from Royals games right now. Maybe by the end of the season, when there's been some time for Otani mania to build, the crowds might be bigger, but maybe now it's still a little early. That's one of the things I'm most curious about is just how big a crossover success Otani will be and therefore how big a crossover success baseball will be. I just know kind of anecdotally my friends and family who are not really that into baseball

except to humor me are really genuinely excited about Otani. Like my wife, who is, you know, moderately interested and knowledgeable about baseball, but not a fan of any team or any player, not really going to be turning on baseball to watch it on her own, is now like asking me, when do the Angels play? What time does the game start? Let's watch the Angels game. And we're both like sitting there watching otani just like giggling at every whiff and he had 25 of those by the way in sunday's game which is something that happens so about 15 times a season so yeah i i don't know i i think he hopefully will be something of a mainstream success was there a number in there?

We're looking for a prediction. You're hemming and hawing. Attendance prediction. So you said it was 35 at the end of last season or something like that? The end of last year. Their last Sunday game was like 32. Yeah. And did you say that we have a data point this year yet or no, not yet?

They've only played a Thursday and a Saturday at home this year. The Saturday was the second game of the season, maybe the best comparison. That was only 17,564. Probably cold, though, I'm going to guess. Okay. Well, all right. I'm going to say if it is Otani starting, I'm going to say they get to 20. I'm going to say 20, which would be a considerable boost given that it is not the second game of the season,

although I guess it is a Sunday. Well, yeah. So the second game of the season although i guess it is a sunday well yeah so the second game of the season was a saturday night game it was 45 degrees windy okay this is going to be a sunday matinee so i'm going to give you a chance to if you'd like to if the weather is nice uh then i will go up to 25 i don know. It's hard for me to imagine the Royals breaking 30 right now. I could be wrong. I'll go 28. Okay. All right.

So we will end there until the next time Otani does something, and we will re-appreciate him anew. By the way, just in case you depend on this podcast for your injury updates, which would be a terrible strategy if you're a fantasy player, Xander Bogarts did indeed hit the disabled list with a small crack in his ankle bone. He is expected to miss 10 to 14 days. You can support the podcast and continue to enable our Otani obsession by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and pledging some small monthly amount. Five listeners who've recently done so include Andrew Schaefer, Ben E., Greg,

Nate Luscombe, and Janet Green. Thanks to all of you. I hope their support will peer pressure all of you into supporting. If Andrew Schaefer, Ben E., Greg, Nate Luscombe, and Janet Green all jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? I don't know. They might know something about that bridge that you don't. In any case, the stakes are a little lower when it comes to supporting the podcast on Patreon. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes, and you can join Thanks for watching. how much we're talking about Shohei Otani to me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will likely do an email episode next time. Until then, enjoy the other baseball players. They're good too. We'll talk to you soon. Don't matter That's why we hold on as the days pass And wait for love