The Angels Must Trade Shohei Ohtani

If L.A. gets any kind of good offer, the math says to trade the best player in baseball.

It isn’t often one of the best athletes on the planet gets traded in the middle of his or her prime. Most of the time, a generational franchise pillar is just that: the player you build everything around for generations to come. But sometimes circumstances make it infeasible to hang onto that player for too long and risk watching them walk away for nothing in return. Such is the extremely painful choice the Los Angeles Angels are looking at over the next two weeks, as they ponder whether to deal away Shohei Ohtani or not.

Ohtani is the best player in baseball, having the best season of his career — and that only begins to scratch the surface of what makes him historically great. He is simultaneously leading MLB in home runs as a batter and allowing the league’s lowest opposing batting average as a pitcher. This kind of thing shouldn’t be possible, at least not in the modern game. Package it in a 6-foot-4 frame, with a winning smile and charismatic disposition, and Ohtani ought to be baseball’s answer to LeBron James or Patrick Mahomes in the broader zeitgeist of sports fame.

But can Ohtani fully achieve that potential with the Angels? Despite playing alongside another all-time icon in Mike Trout, Ohtani has never participated in the postseason — and that is unlikely to change this year. It’s not that the Angels are terrible; boosted by Ohtani’s incredible season, they sat at 44-37 on June 27 before an ill-timed run of 11 losses in 13 contests around the All-Star break left them two games below .500 (46-48) as of Monday. In a crowded American League playoff picture, however, that’s not going to be enough to get the job done. According to an average of the prediction models at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference, Los Angeles now has just a 5 percent chance to make the playoffs in Ohtani’s final season under contract before hitting free agency.

Perhaps ominously — as far as the Angels are concerned — Ohtani (through his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara) told reporters gathered at the All-Star Game that his desire to play for a winner has taken on greater importance with each passing season.

"Those feelings get stronger year by year," said Ohtani, who turned 29 on July 5. "It sucks to lose. [I] want to win, so it gets stronger every year."

While it’s still possible for the Angels to sneak into the postseason — or, alternatively, back up the Brink’s truck to Ohtani’s house and keep him around with a massive contract extension, like they did with Mike Trout before the 2019 season — it also doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see the writing on the wall spelling out Ohtani’s exit from Anaheim. Yes, the Angels have publicly insisted they want to keep Ohtani. But they’re also reportedly listening to offers, which everyone expects will come from the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees and New York Mets, among others. With their playoff odds so low, the only question might be whether the Angels want to ship him out for some kind of return this summer, or see him leave for nothing but a compensatory draft pick in free agency.

No matter what route Los Angeles GM Perry Minasian chooses to take, here’s what Ohtani’s future value profile looks like: Treating his batting and pitching like separate players, I looked for the 50 most similar players within the same range of Wins Above Replacement at ages 23 through 28, and averaged what those players did in each of their next 11 seasons — 11 years being the median length of all active contracts in MLB’s $300 million club. Adding in Ohtani’s pace over the rest of the 2023 season as well — which his new team would be acquiring via trade this year no matter what (and assuming his recent finger injuries don’t slow down his pitching output) — we would expect him to produce another 22.8 WAR batting and 15.1 WAR pitching over that span, for a grand total of 37.9 WAR.

That’s a lot of value! (It’s basically the entire career WAR of Paul O'Neill, Hanley Ramirez, Madison Bumgarner, Magglio Ordonez or José Bautista.) But of course, how much of that full value a team can truly get depends upon its chances of signing Ohtani for 2024 and beyond. 

Take the Angels as an example. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say their odds of re-signing Ohtani align perfectly with their playoff odds — so if they hang onto him at the deadline, we’ll say they also have a 5 percent chance of convincing him to come back after the season via a playoff appearance. In terms of Ohtani’s expected value, he would be worth just about 6.7 future WAR from Los Angeles’ perspective — the 5.0 WAR he’s tracking to produce the rest of this season, which L.A. gets to keep no matter what, plus a 5 percent chance at getting the remaining 32.9 WAR he’s projected to produce for his next team through the 2034 campaign.

This math explains why the Angels should probably trade Ohtani: If they get any offer likely to exceed 6.7 wins worth of value over the next decade-plus — not a high bar to clear, as we’ll see below — it would be worth it because they’re so unlikely to convince Ohtani to stay and reap the benefits of his full future value. And this is also why other teams with stronger playoff odds should feel desperate to trade for Ohtani. If a potential trading partner feels like it has a 100 percent chance of signing Ohtani after the season, it would come out ahead if it trades any amount of talent up to the full 37.9 future wins worth of value that its new franchise cornerstone is projected to produce. (They might even put an extra premium on the short-term boost to World Series odds Ohtani would add in 2023.) From both perspectives — that of the Angels and of their trade partners — the incentives strongly favor trading Ohtani.

In reality, no team can count on a 100 percent chance of re-signing Ohtani. He is going to test the market and may even play big-spending teams off of each other to maximize his contract. But a trade partner with an 80 percent chance of re-signing Ohtani can still expect 31.4 WAR from him, and price that into the package sent L.A.’s way in a deal. It would be an offer neither side could refuse.

So how much prospect talent would a team need to assemble in order to match Ohtani’s expected future value in a trade? This is the kind of calculation teams must do when negotiating a trade package for a player like Ohtani, much the same way NFL teams base their draft-day trades off of a chart that assigns a value to each pick.

As luck would have it, back in 2014 I calculated the expected future value of a player ranked among Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects. For instance, I found that the No. 1 prospect could be expected to produce about 17 WAR over the seven seasons that followed the ranking’s release — and we can use the same data to look at the next 11 seasons instead, to match our time horizon for Ohtani’s future contract.

If we do that and smooth things out using a logarithmic curve, we find that the top prospect can be expected to produce 26.5 WAR over the next 11 seasons, a number that falls to 23.3 for the No. 2 prospect, 21.5 for No. 3 and so forth. (So to get to a fair match for Ohtani’s expected future value of 37.9 WAR, we’d need to add prospects No. 1 and 27, or Nos. 2 and 14, etc.)

But before we finalize the combinations that would match Ohtani’s future value, we have to price in the probability that these prospects will also leave their original team before accruing all of their future value. So in practical terms, the No. 1 prospect is only worth 18.6 WAR on average to the team with which he makes his debut, as the rest of his value belongs to his subsequent teams.

With that in mind, a fair return for Ohtani’s entire 11-year contract value (plus 2023) would be prospects No. 1, 2 and 92. Or Nos. 2, 3 and 31. Or Nos. 5, 6 and 7, plus another minor prospect outside the Top 100. You get the idea: Ohtani’s maximum potential price is a substantial amount of future talent. (Based on the Top 100 prospect list for 2023, only four MLB teams — the Baltimore Orioles, Arizona Diamondbacks, Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets — would be able to match Ohtani’s full expected future value even if they emptied their entire stock of top prospects.)

Even if L.A. is willing to make a deal, then, it might be surprisingly tough to find a match between the Angels and a contender that has the massive stockpile of prospects to give them fair value in return. But as we noted above, a truly balanced offer for Ohtani at the 2023 deadline would include the uncertainty around his new team being able to keep him beyond just this season. It would also be affected by other considerations such as the Halos’ ticking clock to make a deal before the Aug. 1 trade deadline, and whether a bidding war forms between different suitors for Ohtani’s services. The factors to consider when building a trade of this magnitude are dizzying.

In other words, it’s going to be a fascinating two weeks on the trade market as we all watch to see whether baseball’s greatest player gets shipped away in a deal that is certain to go down in MLB history — no matter how it pans out.

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Filed under: Baseball