January 16. 2018
I’ve never been a huge fan
of Dave Cameron but I recognize the enormous contribution he has made. One of
the seminal writers and originators of Fangraphs.com, he has inspired many
excellent analysts to take up the keyboard and explore all things baseball.
That is not an easy thing to do. What makes Cameron unique is that as an
analyst, he was pretty terrible. One could write a book on the number of
subjects he wrote about and got completely wrong. One of the more notable
instances was when he predicted back in 2008 that the Seattle Mariners were the
sixth most likely franchise to win a World Series within the next five years,
in large part because they had hired Jack Zduriencik
away from the Brewers. At the time, Zduriencik was
the Assistant GM with the Brewers and was noted for his early embrace of sabermetrics, as well as his history in scouting. On his
first day on the job, Zduriencik talked about how he
was going to build a franchise with players who possess good character. It sounds
great but the thing is that in the nine years he was either director of
scouting or AGM, he had not really established a great track record of finding
players with good character. Sure, there were some can’t miss draft picks like
Prince Fielder, but by and large most of his can’t miss good character guys
missed, either on talent or character or both (Dave Krynzel,
Mike Jones, Mark Rogers, Jeremy Jeffress, Matt LaPorta, Brett Lawrie, Rickie
Weeks, Ryan Braun were all first picks). The Brewers finished no better than
third in a weak division for all but two of his years there and only once did
they make the expanded playoffs, almost entirely on the strength of CC Sabathia’s left arm, who had been
a mid-season acquisition from the Indians.
But I digress… the point
is that while in theory a guy like Zduriencik was the
way to go – someone who relied both on scouting and advanced metrics to
formulate his conclusions – that particular guy was not the right guy for the
job. He just wasn’t very good at identifying the kind of players he wanted to
identify. That became painfully evident as
Still, and I want to make this perfectly clear, I think
the Padres did an incredibly smart thing by hiring Cameron to lead their
analytics department because the one thing that he is brilliant at is asking
the right questions. Even though his analysis was frequently off because it
focused largely on only half the equation (strictly the numbers side, and even
then it used some numbers that shouldn’t be used for scouting like WAR and xWAR) he was always looking where franchises should be
looking for answers. Which player is the most valuable, once you consider both
his talent and his contract? Which organizations are best suited for a
sustained run at a title? Which contracts are better than they look? Or worse? Cameron was almost always on point with his
exploration of where the spotlight needed to be focused. And for a major league
franchise, that is one of the most important skills to have in-house because
with their practically unlimited resources, they can get the right guys to get
the answers. But without that guy who is asking the right questions, they are
as lost as if they got all the wrong guys. So congratulations, San Diego
Padres, your franchise is about to get much better because you have one of the
best around at pointing the spotlight where it needs to be. He’ll get the
discussion going in the right direction, which is half the challenge of a
successful franchise.
Which
brings me to Shohei Ohtani…
For its entire history,
fantasy baseball has been one of the greatest engines for change in baseball in
large part because as competitors looked for an edge on how to win it, they
invested time and energy into new ways of evaluating players. Without fantasy
baseball, publications like Baseball
So fantasy baseball has
always been on the right side of understanding the future of baseball.
But they got it wrong when
it came to Shohei Ohtani.
In fact, they couldn’t be more wrong.
The actual player promises
to become one of the better starting pitchers in baseball, but his unique
talent set might allow him to become an effective DH or outfielder as well. No
other player since Babe Ruth has had this intriguing skill set. In fact, should
he fulfill his promise – and unlike many Japanese players coming to MLB, he’s
still well before his prime years so he should get better than he already is –
he will be one of the most valuable players in baseball, if not the most
valuable. And one would have a very compelling argument that if he indeed
becomes a star pitcher and a star hitter, that he will be the most valuable
player since Ruth.
The current convention in
fantasy baseball, however, is that he isn’t that valuable. In the most notable
expert and competition leagues, he is being either restricted to being drafted
as a pitcher only, or he must be drafted as a pitcher or a hitter and if you
want to have both he will use two roster spots. So any team that
rosters him is getting penalized twice for owning him. The first time is
because they would only be getting half his actual production, and the second
is because the owner then loses a roster or reserve spot that he could use for
another player. In essence, he’s being forced to play short-handed. And even if
Ohtani becomes an absolute stud in one or the other
disciplines, he will never get his real value. In fact, there are several
casual formats (like a ten-team mixed) in which he is neither tradeable or rosterable because
of the manufactured handicaps. Despite the fact that all 30 MLB teams made bids
for his services because it is clear he is the most intriguing player to come
along in a generation, in fantasy he will likely be a middling roster option.
And let’s be clear, having
him on a major league roster is a huge advantage. If a team can use one of
their starting pitchers as their regular DH, they no longer need to spend
millions of dollars and a roster spot on finding a DH. They can use that money
and that spot to fill other needs. Perhaps acquire a defensive specialist for
late innings, or another reliever for a deeper bullpen. The point is that if a
player can do two things well at the major league level, he gives his team an
advantage over a player who can only do one thing well.
The argument is that he’s
a pitcher and in fantasy the pitcher’s hitting stats are never counted. And
even if they did, it wouldn’t be fair to have an extra hitter. He would
imbalance the game.
But that is exactly who he
is. There will always be players who challenge our conventions and make the
game seem unfair. Rickey
I have heard a number of
people reference that Wayne Gretzky was divided into
two players during his heyday – one for the goal scorer and one for the assist
leader. But how is that even remotely logical? It’s one guy, perhaps the most
dominant player in any sport in history. Yes, it means one team will have a
huge advantage of having him on the team if he is one player. So what? Sports
are inherently unfair because there’s always some uber-talented
guy who comes along and gives his team a huge advantage. Ask the teams that
faced Wilt Chamberlain. The point is that just because the guy is a juggernaut,
that doesn’t give anyone the right to dissect him so that everyone can have a
chance of winning. That is so antithetical to sports that it boggles the mind
that anyone would even consider it. The truly great players are the very reason
we watch the game. It is why we watch any sport.
At the SABR convention
announcing his development of Win Shares, Bill James freely admitted that his
first effort failed because the final results showed that a number of 19th
century pitchers were by far the most valuable players ever. To James, that
didn’t make sense. What had happened was that in his calculation, the number of
innings they pitched imbalanced their contribution to the team’s chances of
winning. James didn’t think that was right, so he arbitrarily diminished the
value of those innings by half so that would not pollute his own narrative as
to who the most valuable players in history were. But honestly, if a pitcher
throws 500+ innings a season, as some of those old guys did, then they should
be recognized as incredibly valuable. Yes, the game was different back then but
that shouldn’t diminish the weight of their contribution. To illustrate further
using a famous Warner Brothers cartoon, if Bugs Bunny can pitch, catch and
field every pitch, then he’s pretty damn valuable because you don’t need as
many other players. Well, the fantasy industry is making the exact same mistake
Bill James did.
How then should fantasy
baseball address him? Essentially Ohtani is just like
any other multi-position eligible player. As long as he has fulfilled the games
required criteria, then he should accumulate all the statistics in every
category in which he contributes as long as he’s active. It does not matter
that he is both pitcher and hitter. All other pitchers in the past have been
solely pitchers and all other hitters have been solely hitters. That is where
they qualified. Ohtani is no different that any other
guy who forces us to re-evaluate our thinking. He’s an 8-category player and
should be recognized as such.
To give an example, the
Angels have him start on a Monday and he goes 7 innings and then for the next 4
of 5 days he is either in the line-up as a DH or plays OF. Then on Sunday he
starts again and goes 7 more innings. So in that week he’s posted 14 innings
pitched and 20-24 plate appearances all at positions he qualifies for. Under
the current convention, an Ohtani owner would only
get the pitching or the hitting unless he used two active roster spots. The
thing is that the Angels didn’t have to. They had a pitcher for two days who
then played as an everyday hitter for four more and the player who accumulated
that playing time only occupied one spot on the roster. They got production
that usually requires two players out of one player. That is what Ohtani should be doing in fantasy as well.
Let me offer a
counter-example. Let’s say Marwin Gonzales, who
qualifies all over the diamond, in a given week plays a couple games at first,
a game at second, a game at third, one in the outfield and maybe during the
late innings of an extra inning game he is asked to play catcher for a few
innings. For the fantasy owner, it does not matter what position they have him
at on the roster. They get all the stats he produced that week, even the ones
where he played a position he did not qualify for (catcher). They were not
limited to only the stats he accumulated at first base if they had him on their
active roster at first. They got all of them, regardless. So can anyone give me
a decent reason why Ohtani shouldn’t also be afforded
the same respect? Other than it would be inconvenient for the stat service, who
by the way, is paid to tabulate stats however they come and whoever accumulates
them.
Let me put it another way.
The best ranging shortstops lead the majors in defensive chances, getting about
400 chances to make a play on defense. The really good ones make about 300 of
those opportunities. A leadoff hitter gets about 700 plate appearances. So at
best, a lead-off hitting, great fielding shortstop would have a hand in about
1100 plays over the course of a season, either on offense or defense. A really
good starting pitcher will face about 900 batters over the course of a season
and might get 75 plate appearances if he’s in the NL. So the players who get
the most opportunities to change the game only get roughly a thousand chances a
season. Ohtani will likely be on an innings limit the
first year but eventually he will likely be one of those top starters. But for
the sake of argument, let’s say he only gets 715 batters faced (160 innings
pitched (*3 outs per inning) + 155 hits allowed + 70 walks + a few reaching on
error, hit batsmen, etc). He’ll also DH for about 350 plate appearances. So
even if he only DHs, he’ll be getting more opportunities to change a game (and
as a pitcher have greater control than a batter) than just about any player.
Now let’s toss in that he might also play first base or outfield, which adds
another hundred or more opportunities to change the game on defense. By the
time you add it all up, in his first season Ohtani
will likely be involved in 6% more plays than any other player. As he grows and
is given more innings, that impact will only grow. So yes, he should be one of
the most valuable commodities in fantasy baseball.
The argument that Ohtani’s a pitcher and pitchers don’t get their hitting
stats is fallacious. Ohtani is also a regular hitter
and as such qualifies to have his hitting stats included. He’s getting four
times as many plate appearances as a regular pitcher. Frankly, I think hitting
stats should be included anyway regardless if a guy is a pitcher or not. NL
pitchers theoretically have an advantage because they face pitchers and can
pitch to the line-up, so they generally accumulate more Ks, and have better ERAs and WHIPs. There is an
advantage to rostering them over
The reason pitcher's hitting
stats have never been included is because their contributions have been
statistically insignificant. Only Mike Hampton and Brook Keischnick
have hit more than 5 home runs in a season since 1971, and in only 1973 and
1977 have more than 3 pitchers hit more than 2. In at least half of those years
the major league leader for pitchers had fewer than 10 RBI or 10 runs. So Ohtani is probably going to be something quite new.
Or quite old depending on
how you look at it. In 1918, just two years after leading the
Fantasy baseball is a
simulation game. The primary objective of any simulation is to come as close to
reality as possible so that conclusions can be drawn to make better decisions
in reality. The more realistic the simulation, the more useful and more
challenging it is. Should fantasy baseball continue with its current course on Ohtani, it will have utterly failed in this primary objective. While it may seem like I’m splitting hairs or
being argumentative, the fact is that distinctions matter. Sometimes they
matter quite a lot. All I’m trying to do is get the discussion going back in
the right direction.