Shohei Ohtani made his MLB debut on March 29, 2018. It was the beginning of “Showtime”. I still remember that back in early 2018, lots of my friends were eager to collect Ohtani’s rookie cards and they bought several boxes of baseball cards once released. Ohtani did not let his fans down and collectors were extremely happy to see Ohtani hit pretty well in his rookie season. Even though Ohtani underwent Tommy John surgery, lots of fans were looking forward to seeing him come back stronger. He did come back on the mound, but it didn’t go well in this shortened season. In the meantime, his hitting also seemed to be discouraging.
Ohtani did hit pretty well in the last two seasons. His numbers showed that he was a good hitter in the 2018 and 2019 season. His OPS dropped to .848 in the 2019 season, but it’s still good. However, Ohtani only had an OPS of .657 this season. In addition, it’s quite interesting that it seems that Ohtani is more patient. On average, Ohtani actually sees more pitches every plate appearance, 4.223 pitches per plate appearance. His walk-to-strikeout ratio is increasing to .440 this season.
Ohtani is more patient at bat, but the outcome doesn’t look good. So let’s try to go a little bit deeper. When we look at Ohtani’s performance against different types of pitches, he’s pretty good at hitting fastballs in the last two seasons. He was hitting breaking pitches well last season. However, it seems that he has some problems against offspeed pitches since his batting average against offspeed pitches dropped dramatically from .275 to .130.
Ohtani’s hard hit rate against fastballs increased to 57.6% this season. From 2018 to 2020, Ohtani has been quite good at hitting fastballs with a hard hit rate of at least 52% each season. Ohtani’s hard hit rate against breaking pitches went up to 50% in the 2019 season, however, it dropped to 26.9% this season. Against offspeed pitches, Ohtani had a hard hit rate of 35.5% in 2018, but it dropped gradually and his hard hit rate against offspeed pitches is only 16.7% this year.
Ohtani surely can make high-quality contact against fastballs. From 2018 to 2020, Ohtani’s xwOBA against fastballs has been above .390. Against breaking pitches or offspeed pitches, Ohtani didn’t have an outstanding xwOBA. Ohtani’s xwOBA against these two types of pitches went below .250 this season.
Compared to 2019, Ohtani’s swing and miss rate against all types of pitches went up. In particular, against fastballs, swing and miss rate went up to 30.3% from 23.3%.
And looking closer to see zone charts year by year, Ohtani hasn’t hit a low and inside pitch well. This season, it seems that Ohtani had problems with low pitches and outside pitches also caused troubles.
Ohtani hasn’t been an outstanding two-way player as expected so far. Injuries limited his performance on the mound. He’d hit pretty well in the last two seasons and was considered one of the most talented baseball players. Nonetheless, this season is definitely a season that Ohtani would like to forget. He was frustrated both on the mound and at the plate. It will be a long off-season for Ohtani and the Angels organization to find the solutions and identify how to best use Ohtani’s talents in the next season.
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