Shohei Ohtani - 2021 Year-in-Review

Baseball fans had the pleasure of watching Shohei Ohtani play a full season, doing things we've never seen done on the baseball field all year long. It was an incredible year, to say the least, for the probable American League MVP.

This is essentially a double-article since Ohtani functioned as two completely different players (for fantasy purposes) in 2021. There is so much to talk about, but I will do my best to not overwhelm readers here. Maybe I should even get paid double for this one, please go ahead and tweet at the RotoBaller management team your support for that notion.

Let's start big and then drill down a bit. Before we start, I'd like to thank everybody for coming on this journey with me, these articles are only fun to write because we know people are reading them. Let's get to it.

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Shohei Ohtani, The Hitter

Final hitting line: .257/.372/.592, 103 R, 100 RBI, 46 HR, 26 SB

A completely absurd final hitting line. Only Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Salvador Perez bested him in long balls, and only seven players stole more bases. If we look at HR+SB, his total of 72 took the crown by a margin of five over Fernando Tatis Jr. That total alone would make him one of the most valuable players in fantasy baseball.

Season stats are rarely distributed evenly throughout the season, and it surely wasn't the case with Ohtani in 2021. Here are his month-by-month totals:

You can see he did the majority of his damage in June and July, hitting 48% of his season homers in those two months and driving in 42% of his runs. The homer pace slowed up quite a bit in August and September, and the batting average was quite bad over the last two months. A bit of a saving grace there was a high walk rate in the final two months of the season as well as those 10 steals.

Let's take a look at some rolling data plots for Ohtani's 2021 season.

To be fair to the guy, the slugging percentage had nowhere to go but down in July. It was no surprise that he could not sustain a .700 SLG, but finishing under .600 was definitely something we would not have predicted in the middle of the year.

The free fall in SLG came alongside the home run rate (PA/HR in this case) severely declining as well.

At his best, Ohtani was homering once every 10.12 PAs, another unsustainable number. With a league average of 30 PA/HR this year, Ohtani's final number of 14 is still super-elite, but he was more of an average power hitter in the second half rather than a league-leading type.

Unsurprisingly, some of the bad numbers in the second half were a consequence of a rising strikeout rate.

He had started to really turn that around in September, as you can see the graph finishing on a downslope. That had more to do with walks rising rather than him actually making a bunch more contact.

Pitchers did not want much to do with Ohtani in the late part of the year, as we see by the 20.4% BB% Ohtani posted after August 1st.

How Did Pitchers Pitch Him?

I dug into this question a bit and found some interesting stuff. I expected to find that after July or so, pitchers started throwing Ohtani fewer fastballs and/or way fewer pitches in the strike zone. This did not turn out to be the case, as the pitch types he faced and the zone rates stayed consistent from the first half of the year to the second.

What was interesting, though, was that pitchers did indeed avoid him. Ohtani saw a fastball just 49.3% of the time, the 10th lowest rate in the league (I looked only at hitters that saw at least 1,000 pitches). He saw just 43% of his pitches land in the strike zone, the third-lowest number in the league (behind Javier Baez and Salvador Perez). He saw just 6.4% of his pitches end up in the middle-middle of the zone, which was the 31st lowest mark in the league.

So while I didn't find that pitchers adjusted to Ohtani throughout the year, I did find that they were just avoiding him for most of the year. It certainly did not help his case that he was without the protection of Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon for the vast majority of the year, and the return of those two big bats next year could really force these numbers I just cited upwards.

Did He Tire Out?

The explanation that people logically landed on when they saw Ohtani's power declining throughout the year was that he was simply tiring out. This would make some sense, as he was piling up the innings pitched while being in the lineup every day swinging harder than almost anybody else in the league.

This is not an easy thing to quantify. We will probably never know if fatigue had an effect on him. The one way I thought that we might check it was to look in-depth at his launch velocities. Ohtani relied on swinging the bat really, really hard this year. It's hard to hit 46 homers without swinging quite hard. So I went month-by-month, finding three things for each month.

1. His maximum launch velocity for that month
2. His average launch velocity for that month
3. His 90th percentile launch velocity for that month

I like the 90th percentile mark the best here because it shows a little bit more than just the one-time big swing that landed perfectly on the center of the baseball. That 90th percentile mark shows you a bit more about the full output of balls in play. You can select the three different categories in the visualization below to see the numbers.

Unsurprisingly, Ohtani's best 90th percentile velocity was in June at a ridiculous 110.6 miles per hour. His second and third best months were July and April, and his three worst were May, August, and September/October.

This is not a super scientific endeavor here, but it does somewhat suggest that his bat speed slowed in the season's final two months.

Ohtani vs. Pitch Types

I also think it's worthwhile to check how hitters fair against each of the three types of pitches. Here's how I classified the pitches, for reference:

Fastball: 4-Seam Fastballs, Sinkers, Cutters
Breaking: Curveballs, Sliders
Offspeed: Changeups, Splitters 

Ohtani really smashed fastballs, which explains why no pitcher wanted to throw him any. The league average slugging percentage against fastballs this year was .446, Ohtani posted a .632. The league average barrel rate against fastballs was 8.7%, Ohtani went for 22.8%. Somewhat surprisingly, he posted a pretty much league average fly-ball rate of 29% (league average 26.6%). His swinging-strike rate was well above the league average as well (8.6%), but those were the pitches he whiffed on least frequently.

The power numbers were elite on the other two pitch groups as well, and the swinging-strike rates were about two points above the league averages of 15% for each.

You can see the disparities there between fastballs and the other two groups in average and slugging percentage, but those are pretty typical disparities that we see. The league batting average against offspeed stuff, for example, is just .231 and against breaking balls it's even lower at .211. It's just tough to hit those pitches, so it's not really out of the ordinary that Ohtani hit 50 points lower against those pitches than fastballs. All of that to say nothing really sticks out here, besides the fact that Ohtani barreled the crap out of every type of pitch this year.

The splits data is where Ohtani differs from the league. Left-handed hitters this year hit .228, slugged .355, and posted a 6.2% barrel rate against left-handed pitchers. Ohtani, on the other hand, did this:

He slugged 70 points better against left-handed pitchers while barreling the ball at a very similar rate. Pretty wild stuff. This will serve to really keep Ohtani's floor as a hitter high since teams can't just roll out left-handed relief pitchers against him to get a big advantage.

Hitting Review

It is really tough to do what Ohtani did at the plate in 2021, even when you're not also logging 130 innings on the mound. It was truly a special season that was just so much fun to watch. Every at-bat there for most of the season was must-see stuff. Incredible.

Now, will we ever see Ohtani repeat the successes he had in 2021? The probabilistic answer is probably not. It's not easy for any player to stay in the lineup every time, much less a guy playing both sides of the ball. Odds are that this is a career-high in games played for Ohtani. The home run is also likely to prove to be a career-high for Ohtani, but that's a much less certain prediction.

The good news is that the floor is sky-high for this guy. It is super rare to find a guy with this much power also walking a ton. While a lot of the walks Ohtani drew are attributable to pitchers just not wanting to face him, he has always shown great plate discipline and strong walk rates. That provides a nice floor to what he'll do at the plate since he's not throwing many PA's away by chasing crap pitches. The return of Trout and Rendon to the lineup behind him is also sure to help him see more pitches to hit next year. All of that plus the steals give him an insanely high fantasy floor while he's playing. Even when he was really struggling in August, he still provided fantasy value with walks, runs, and steals.

I don't see any reason to not put Ohtani as a top 15 hitter next year considering his floor/ceiling combination, even while I will probably shy away from putting him in my top five or ten.

Shohei Ohtani the Pitcher

Final pitching line: 23 GS, 130.1 IP, 3.18 ERA, 3.55 xFIP, 1.09 WHIP, 29.3% K%, 8.3% BB%, 45% GB%

Let's look at how Ohtani's season broke down by the month, first here are the basic stats:

and here are the advanced, more interesting, metrics:

You can see that Ohtani was pretty consistent on the mound throughout the year. The biggest standout numbers on the above tables are the walk rates. He really struggled in April and May with the walk, and it looked like that was going to severely hold him back on the hill. However, he quickly sorted that out and walked just nine hitters over his final 70.1 innings. From July 1st onwards, Ohtani's 24.1% K-BB% was 10th best in the entire league, and it was fourth-best for pitchers that also posted a 40% or better ground-ball rate.

If you've read my analysis of pitching before, you know that I primarily rely on three things when evaluating pitchers: strikeout rate, walk rate, and ground-ball rate. These statistics are much more resilient and reliable when projecting forward, and they correlate very well with overall success. Ohtani posted great numbers in all three categories there. His 29% walk rate is about five points above the league average, his 7.9% walk rate is a point below the league average, and the 46% ground-ball rate is also about five points above the average. Amazing numbers.

Of his 23 starts, only two of them were truly bad starts. We can display that by plotting his DraftKings points, like this:

He fell below 10 DraftKings points just twice, and both of those were very bad starts falling into the negatives. Looking at pitchers with 20 or more starts, Ohtani finished with the 12th best average DraftKings score on the mound (20.18 points per start). The names ahead of him: Corbin Burnes, Max Scherzer, Carlos Rodon, Zack Wheeler, Gerrit Cole, Robbie Ray, Brandon Woodruff, Walker Buehler, Kevin Gausman, Freddy Peralta, and Julio Urias. Pretty elite company.

You can say this about pretty much all pitchers, but if you take Ohtani's worst start of the year out of the equation, the 0.2 inning, seven earned run disaster against the Yankees, his ERA falls to 2.71. I think that number would put him in the Cy Young conversation despite finishing almost ten starts behind the leaders.

As for how his arm held up while he was piling up an innings count that few people actually expected, there were no issues on that front.

The Angels clearly had nothing but confidence in his arm's health, allowing him to exceed 100 pitches in three of his last four with a high of 117. His velocity also stayed steady all year, and as you can see in September, was even higher than it was for most of the year. Ohtani looked amazing in September despite the unmatched workload on his body from five months of playing both ways. Incredible stuff.

Pitch Arsenal

Let's take a peek at Ohtani's stats by pitch type. This screenshot is from my own custom-made Tableau dashboard, which is free to utilize here.

You can see that Ohtani utilized four different pitches at a significant rate. He threw his four-seamer 44% of the time, the slider 22%, the splitter 18%, the cutter 12%, and the curveball a lowly 3.5%. Only the splitter posted a swinging-strike rate that we would consider elite, but there are no bad numbers in that regard either. The best part of the chart is the high ground-ball rates, as Ohtani generated tons of ground-balls on all of his main pitches beside the slider, which almost no pitchers get a ton of ground-balls with.

The splitter is notoriously a tough pitch to throw, and you will see most of the league's splitter pitchers sometimes just stop using it because they don't have the feel for the pitch. This was true with Ohtani. He threw 10 or fewer splitters on eight occasions, and fewer than 15 a dozen times. When he didn't have the splitter, he did tend to get fewer strikeouts. However, he was still great at preventing base runners, using the cutter and slider a little bit more, and relying on that strong four-seam fastball. Pitchers that rely on the splitter for their strikeouts are inherently a little riskier, but Ohtani's deep arsenal and newfound awesome command should keep those problems at bay moving forward.

Pitching Review

Pitchers are naturally harder to predict year-to-year. I would have much more faith in Ohtani being an elite hitter in 2022 rather than an elite pitcher again. It is not easy to throw even 130 innings in the big leagues, especially when you're in the lineup every day.

That said, Ohtani has a really strong arsenal of pitches to depend on, and his high ground-ball rate brings a nice floor to his outings as well. As long as he's healthy (which is not guaranteed, of course), I don't see a ton of ways that he really falls flat on the mound.

Conclusion/2022 Thoughts

I tried to find negatives here with Ohtani, but I really couldn't do it. At the plate, he boosts his floor with plate discipline and steals, and on the mound, he is buoyed by a deep pitch arsenal and a high ground-ball rate. The only real question with Ohtani for 2022 seems to be health. It's hard to believe Ohtani did what he did this year, throwing 130 innings and seeing 639 plate appearances. It's much too rosy to expect that to happen again next year, and I think that alone probably means Ohtani will be slightly over-drafted next year.

League type makes a huge difference with how you should evaluate Ohtani for 2022.

In leagues where Ohtani is two different players:

Ohtani the hitter is an easy top ten bat next year, even if you don't think he'll crack 40 homers again. The walks and steals and raw power make it hard to let him slip past the top five or so, although I imagine I have him closer to ten than to five. Ohtani the pitcher, while great, is held back by his innings pitched projection. They aren't going to run this guy out there every five days, and they will continue to be prone to being very careful with his innings. It feels to me like 130 innings we just saw is about the ceiling. That keeps him out of the top ten pitchers pretty easily, I'd say. I imagine he's more of a top-25 guy.

In leagues where Ohtani is one player:

If you can switch him between hitting and pitching every individual day, Ohtani is the hands-down #1 player in fantasy baseball and it's not close. In leagues where you have to pick one slot every week, he falls precipitously, but he still says in the top 25 overall players just because of the versatility and upside.

I hope you all enjoyed this piece, and I look forward to writing many more thousands of words about Shohei Ohtani in the future.

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