Sunday Shohei: How the Angels should use their new gift.

Since the announcement that Shohei Ohtani had agreed to come to Anaheim, the Angel blogosphere has been afire with ideas and suggestions as to what manager Mike Scioscia needs to do to keep the most interesting prospect in baseball productive and healthy.

Just here at Halo Hangout, there’s already been ample discussion as to the upfront concerns about keeping Ohtani healthy, including going to a six-man rotation — and that was before the freak out that went along with the revelation that Shohei Ohtani had an elbow procedure that was not made public before his signing.  (It was only a revelation to the public, as MLB and all 30 teams knew about the procedure beforehand.)

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The amount of digital ink split over this 23-year-old foreign prospect is both astonishing, especially considering just how little Americans actually know about Ohtani; the “Japanese Babe Ruth” label tends to eclipse reasonable approaches to the types of expectations he’ll be dealing with. That said, the amount of attention is also completely reasonable. After all, what’s better than a true-to-life Sidd Finch fantasy? Playing overseas, Ohtani’s raw numbers fly off the page, and without an eye test or American minor league comparables, our collective imaginations feel free to run wild.

Fantasy baseball sites, not knowing how to handle a player of Ohtani’s versatility, have taken the King Solomon approach and split Ohtani in half, treating him as two different players. That’s actually the approach the Angels should take as well when thinking about how to best utilize him.

The Sho-Hey Kid

Over the last two seasons, Ohtani has logged 613 plate appearances, approximately equal to a full season’s worth of swings in a Major League season, over which he’s clocked 30 homers and 34 doubles, drawn 78 walks, and struck out 161 times. His .326/.411/.570 slash line between the age of 22 and 23 would make him a top five prospect in any big league farm system.

… At least, that’s how most organizational scouts are characterizing Ohtani’s performance. The Nippon Professional  Baseball League is often considered the equivalent of Triple-A baseball in the United States, or perhaps a slight notch above that. However, that’s not necessarily true. In an article for Baseball Prospectus 15 years ago, Clay Davenport did an audit on Nippon baseball, comparing crossover players from Japan and the United States. His conclusion: “By historical standards, the present-day Central and Pacific Leagues are fully deserving of the “major league” label.” This isn’t to say that NPB is the equivalent to MLB, of course; there just aren’t enough Japanese position players who have come over to pin down relative performance levels, just that  a terrific Japanese League performer is every bit as good a prospect that an American minor league prospect is.

There are other factors that need to be considered. Ohtani is not, for example, slap-happy 5 feet, 10 inch, 175 pound Ichiro, nor is he 5′ 9″, 180 Nori Aoki. No, Ohtani is a big dude, 6′ 4″, 205 pounds. When he swings, he isn’t looking to hit’em where they ain’t. Instead, Ohtani incorporates a leg kick reminiscent of Josh Donaldson or (dare I say it?) Ken Griffey Jr., loading up on his back foot and generating an incredibly powerful swing. Despite the big swing, Ohtani does an excellent job keeping his hands back, which allows him to wait on breaking balls and pitches away.

The long swing does mean he racks up strikeouts (his 27% K-rate is something to keep an eye on), but when he does make contact, it’s almost always hard. According to MLB tracking data, line drives coming off Ohtani’s bat have an average exit velocity of 96.6 MPH, which would put Ohtani in the top 9% of major leaguers, and fly balls come off at 94.3 MPH, which would be a top-13% number. In other words, Ohtani hits the ball as hard as Freddy Freeman and J.D. Martinez. He’s also topped out at over 110 MPH, numbers only Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton exceeded in 2017.

Given the move to a league with consistently higher-quality pitching, we should expect a lot of early strikeouts, and very possibly a platoon split as Ohtani figures out American pitching and the American strike zone. However, given how terrible the Angels were at 1B and DH last season, they could do a lot worse than give Ohtani time to figure things out. In fact, the Angels had the weakest DH production in the league season — but we’ll get to that later.

Sunday Shohei

As intriguing as Ohtani’s bat is, it’s his right arm that had big league teams salivating over him. Due to a non-pitching injury, he was limited to just 25 innings on the mound in 2017, but in the previous two seasons, Ohtani threw a combined 300.2 innings, allowed just 189 hits and walking 91 while striking out 374 batters in a league where the strikeout rate is just 18% (as opposed to nearly 22% in MLB in 2017).

The most obvious weapon he owns is the one that lights up the speed gun. Ohtani’s fastball sits at 97.5 MPH, and he’s been known to vary it from the low 90s to a NPB-record 102 MPH. Needless to say, that’s exceptional all by itself, but Ohtani also puts an above-average spin on his fastball, giving it extra ride that, combined with his speed, makes his high fastball very tough to touch.

Changing speeds is not optional for big league starters (otherwise, you’re just Esteban Yan, throwing 100-MPH batting practice), and Ohtani has an unexpectedly diverse repertoire. He compliments his heat with a slider in the high 80s that cuts from right to left, and a mid-80s splitter that bottoms out over the strike zone. He also throws two different curveballs, a la Cliff Lee, one a big slow 12-to-6 curve, and the other a harder spin that looks like a slower version of his slider. To top it off, he began using a straight change taught to him by Trevor Hoffman in 2016 that he used sparingly in-game action, but wants to use more often to set up his fastball.

Reminder: He only 23.

He’s only 23, and that’s scares people. Young pitchers whose elbows fall apart are not only common in professional baseball, they’re almost required to have one if they pitch for the Angels. That Ohtani had the unpublicized procedure on his elbow doesn’t quell any concerns, and thus, there’s a rush to find ways to protect the young star and his golden arm. There’s also the very real possibility that, by investing a roster slot to him, the Angels would be doubly boned if Ohtani happened to go down with an injury for any length of time, losing both a pitcher and a bat.

In this context, the six-man rotation idea that’s been making the rounds on the Internet makes perfect sense.The idea of such a rotation sounds radical, in the United States, but most NPB teams operate with a six-man rotation, including the team Ohtani played for, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. With the Angels nursing a wounded staff of recovering surgery patients back to health, having extra off-days for their pitchers might be a tremendous idea; after all, limiting Garrett Richards to get 150 innings out of him might be less than the full season you’d rather have, but it’d still be 100 more innings than Richards has thrown in the last two years put together. If the idea is to keep Ohtani’s pitching workload down while being able to use his bat, then this is likely the way it has to go.

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There’s actually a significant historical precedent for this in the major leagues. (There are actually two significant historical precedents, but we’re not gong to do the Babe Ruth thing because comparisons to Ruth are silly.) At the beginning of the1935 season, 33-year-old Ted Lyons, the long-time ace of the Chicago White Sox was entering his 14th season. As was the case for most front-line pitchers of the era, he had carried a tremendous workload throughout his 20s, and between the mileage on his arm and an injury to his pitching shoulder, he’d seen his effectiveness wane.

ChiSox manager Jimmy Dykes decided to start giving his veteran extra days off to stretch him out. Back in those days, Sundays were for doubleheaders, and it would be Lyons’ job to take one of those two games so the rest of the rotation could roll along without having to worry about skipping starts.It took a few years, but between the extra rest and the development of a knuckleball, Lyons manage to reinvigorate his career. Between 1938 and 1942, Lyons, pitching almost exclusively on Sundays for that half decade, putting up a 61-41 record and an excellent 3.14 ERA. His excellent final act put Sunday Teddy Lyons into the Hall of Fame.

Of course, nobody expected Sunday Teddy to hit a ton.

My Safe Word is “Pujols”

All of the “OMG how can we use him!” chatter swirling around Ohtani tends to forget one very obvious detail: It’s already been done. In 2016, over the course of the normal 140-game NPB schedule, Hokkaido started Ohtani 20 times as a pitcher, gave him another 84 games at DH, and rested him about a quarter of the time. Except for two weeks when he was out with a minor injury, Ohtani made all of his starts, and never played on days after his turn in the rotation. In return, Ohtani gave the Ham Fighters 140 innings of outstanding pitching (1.86 ERA, 0.957 WHIP). Offensively he posted a .322/.416/.588 line. He was selected as the best pitcher and best DH of the Japan Pacific League, and won the MVP.

For all the folks at home wondering what the Angels should do, that’s what the Angels should do.  A “Sunday Shohei” schedule would slot Ohtani for 28 starts in 2018. The Angels would give him a day off every Monday, and since they get more Monday off days than any other day, 11 days off, starting him exclusively on Sunday would guarantee that after 11 of those starts the Angels can rest Ohtani without having to worry about losing his bat for a game offensively. Moreover, since the new schedule calls for more off-day travel days, there are only six weeks in the season where the Angels would not have an off day.

This means that for the vast majority of the season they would have a six-day-per-week schedule that would fit perfectly into a Sunday Shohei rotation schedule, and allow the Angels to run out a six-man rotation without having to worry about skipping starts. With any luck, it could pay off for Ohtani like it did for Sunday Teddy. Liberally sprinkling another 25 to 35 off-days throughout the season for him — resting him against lefty pitching, for example — and the Angels would be recreating the conditions under which Ohtani became the most prodigious talent in Asia.

It could also reap dividends for the rest of the rotation. The only Angel to notch more than 150 innings last season was Ricky Nolasco, and that was most definitely not a good thing for the Angels. Every other starter that opened the season in Anaheim got hurt. Every single one. Right now, the Angels are staring at a starting rotation that would include Ohtani, Garrett Richards, Parker Bridwell, Matt Shoemaker, Andrew Heaney, Tyler Skaggs, and J.C. Ramirez, and except for Bridwell, everyone else is coming back from major surgery. Shepherding them through an entire season may be more likely if they all got extra rest, and the Angels would be much more likely to succeed getting 150 innings good innings out of Richards, Shoemaker, et al.

However, this particular solution does create other problems for the Angels, the most obvious being that Albert Pujols is going to have to play first base, and anyone who’s seen Pujols the last two seasons knows that may be a very big ask for him. Slowed by age and an endless series of foot injuries, Pujols last season delivered not only the worst offensive season of his wonderful career, but the worst offensive season in the entire league. The hopeful expectation in 2018 is that Pujols’ drop-off was so extreme that he can’t help but bounce back a little. A more realistic approach may be to wait until Pujols gets his 3,000th hit, then start dramatically reducing his playing time in favor of C.J. Cron (if he doesn’t get traded).

There are suggestions that Ohtani play the field, but those aren’t realistic. Ohtani hasn’t played the field in a regular season game in three years, and a prolonged injury to him wouldn’t just be bad, it would be catastrophic. Just as Ohtani gives the Angels essentially an extra roster slot by being both a hitter and a pitcher, losing him means losing two players at once. His health, beginning the moment he signed his contract with the Angels, became the organization’s single most important on-field priority. In this context, Pujols’ ability to play first base on a semi-regular basis becomes vital to the team.