MLB has long been a numbers-based league: everything a players does or doesn’t do is quantified.
Since 2015, however, everything changed with the introduction of Statcast, an incredible resource that offers important bits of data about players’ performance.
Not only are Statcast metrics descriptive (they tell the story of what a player has done), but some of them actually have predictive properties: for example, if a player is hitting the ball hard often and lifting it into the air, we can firmly say that there will be plenty of homers on the horizon for him.
Statheads and statisticians love Los Angeles Angels two-way star Shohei Ohtani because he is what is known as a “Statcast darling”: he rates positively in many of the things measured by this tool, such as pitch velocity, average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA), and others.
MLB insider Sarah Langs posted a picture that tells us everything we need to do about Ohtani.
The “Ohtani Experience”
“The Ohtani Experience: appearing in all 4 ‘top’ lists on the Statcast gamefeed,” she said, while posting four leaderboards.
The Ohtani Experience: appearing in all 4 'top' lists on the Statcast gamefeed pic.twitter.com/x6Pe3DKT5a
— Sarah Langs (@SlangsOnSports) June 10, 2022
Not only Ohtani can pitch well and hit like a slugger: he looks and acts like an ace and his numbers, both mainstream metrics and under-the-hood advanced stats, prove that he is a top offensive performer.
He throws extremely hard (topping out a 101 mph) and earns his fair share of swings and misses; but he is also capable of appearing in the exit velocity leaderboard.
If that wasn’t enough, he hit the furthest ball of the night on Thursday against the Boston Red Sox, a game in which he homered from the plate and pitched seven one-run innings from the mound.
He is a beast.
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