Shohei Ohtani Is Having His Best Year Yet. Will It Finally Matter?
The Angels are winning with Ohtani putting on a show. Somehow, that still might not be enough.
If we didn’t know better, we might think it inconceivable for a player like Shohei Ohtani to keep raising the bar for himself. He already had the best two-way season anyone alive had ever witnessed in 2021, then somehow found a different way to get even better last year. How can you improve on a couple of masterpiece seasons that nobody thought were even possible in the modern game just a half-decade ago?
And yet, here we are — marveling over Ohtani’s latest feats that have to be seen to be believed. Such as 10 home runs in the last 16 games (several of which traveled in excess of 450 feet), bringing his season total up to a league-leading 22, plus multiple solid starts on the mound in the same span. By total Wins Above Replacement, this is on pace to be the best season of Ohtani’s career to date, between both his batting and pitching value:
Unlike just about always, the Los Angeles Angels are also not doing horribly this season. L.A. currently has a 39-32 record, which would represent the first non-losing season of the franchise’s Ohtani Era. And while we now know that any declaration to the effect of “this might finally be the year the Angels find success” is potentially premature, an average of the forecast models at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference calls for Los Angeles to finish the year with 85.5 wins — its most in a season since posting 98 in 2014 (still the team’s lone playoff campaign since 2009).
And yet, even that might not be enough, as depressing as it sounds. Those same forecasts assign L.A. just a 32% chance to make the playoffs on average, thanks to a crowded American League wild card race made more crowded by early-season storylines like the Rays’ dominance, the Rangers’ surprising breakout (which makes an Angels division title unlikely and pushes the Astros into the wild-card mix) and the Orioles’ staying power. The Angels picked a bad year to actually be decent for a change.
Maybe the most ironic part is that L.A. would be in much better shape if their other superstar, Mike Trout, was playing the way we’re used to seeing Mike Trout play. Trout hasn’t been bad by any stretch; he’s an above-average hitter and a plus fielder, and even his oft-criticized .248 batting average is right at the MLB norm. But this just isn’t the same kind of performance we typically expected from Trout as recently as a few years ago, before injuries and age started taking their toll on a player that once seemed immune to such mortal concerns.
With 4.51 WAR per 162 team games this year, Trout is easily on pace for the worst full season of his career. There are a few ways to think about that fact: First, if 4.5 WAR is considered a really bad year, you are probably one of the greatest players in baseball history. But also, if Trout played to his usual pre-2020 form (an average of 8.9 WAR per season), the Angels would be tracking for more like 90 wins than 85.5. And the Angels are in the sweet spot where that difference really, really matters to a team’s playoff odds.
No, it’s not fair to put all of that on Trout when the team’s injury list is growing and its starting rotation remains as mediocre as ever. But it’s possible that Trout playing like a lessened-yet-still-great version of himself costs the Angels the playoffs. If so, that would be another cruel twist of fate for a team and superstar who’ve had plenty of those over the years.
And the cruelest part of all might be that another year without the postseason in Anaheim spurs Ohtani to leave town when he hits free agency after this season. Because the unavoidable truth is that players as good as Ohtani (or Trout, for that matter) deserve to be in the playoffs, particularly when they keep raising their performance standard to ever-expanding levels of awesomeness.
Filed under: Baseball