Ohtani Porn 2023: What if Mike Schmidt Pitched Like Jake Peavy?

You cannot predict Shohei, you can only hope to appreciate his artistry.

Who does Shohei Ohtani hit like?

To the naked eye, Sho can look like Ichiro Suzuki, if only Ichiro was 6’4”, 230 with a baby face and Tiger Beat hair, had learned to quiet his feet at the plate instead of run toward first base in midswing, and could hit the ball 500 feet. So yeah, maybe our match lies elsewhere.

Back in 2008-2010, when the Angels still seemed to have a bright future, I used to guesstimate how the team’s mostly young players might perform in the future by utilizing Baseball Reference’s marvelous Play Index function. My go-to formula went something like this: Search on the careers of all players at the same position through the subject’s same age, and then limit the boundaries to within 25% of the same number of plate appearances and +/- 10 points of OPS+ (which adjusts OPS, or on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, across ballpark and seasonal differences, arriving at a global average of 100). From there you just sort of eyeball things. 

Alert readers can immediately spot the problem(s) with applying any such algorithm to Shohei -- he’s a pitcher/designated hitter, a combination that ... has never existed before. Pitchers have occasionally worked their way into other spots in the lineup, it is true, but the other 15 guys who logged between 1704 and 2840 plate appearances by age 27 while pitching in at least 5% of their games all retired before the invention of airplanes (or crayons). Even leaving mound-work out of it, the complete list of primary designated hitters of that age & experience with career OPS’s of between 129 and 149 is: Shohei Ohtani.

So we need to split the baby in half; treat hitter Shohei and pitcher Ohtani as their own separate creatures, then blow out our unproductively narrow search parameters. For instance, on the offense side, even if you remove the plate-appearance cap for DHs and consider all OPS+s over 100, you still get just five total comps; four of them fat guys (the fifth is former Angel meatsicle Brad Fullmer), none of them approaching Shohei’s career OPS+ of 139. Most players designated to not play defense already by their early 20s are not exactly swimsuit models; Ohtani is one of the best athletes to ever play baseball, only DH’ing to conserve strength for throwing 100 mph cutters.

Before I go hunting for more plausible offensive comps, I did want to linger on one tantalizingly similar pairing of primary DHs through age 27: Shohei, and future Hall of Famer David Ortiz:

NM  PA   R   2B  HR RBI  BB  K   AVG  OBP  SLG OPS+

SO 2272 326 103 127 342 260 612 .267 .354 .532 139

DO 2202 294 147  89 339 244 422 .271 .353 .491 116

It’s true: Ohtani through age 27 produced similar looking but demonstrably superior offensive results than a guy who’s in Cooperstown only for hitting. But it’s also true that Ortiz didn’t really become Big Papi until moving to Boston at age 27, after which he raked pretty much uninterrupted for 14 years, a feat unlikely to be replicated.

Onward. There are two further confounding factors screwing up any search for hitters similar to Ohtani: Most Major League Baseball players as talented as he is get their first cup of coffee before age 23; he was obviously in Japan. Then there was the COVID wipeout year of 2020, disappearing 102 scheduled regular season games.

So to find hitters who actually resemble Shohei both physically and performatively, let’s focus on his uninterrupted age-26/27 seasons (2021-22), while opening up the search to hitters from all positions, keeping an eye out for big athletic fast guys who struck out a bunch and didn’t hit for a particularly high average.

Here's your list: 86 mashers; 33 of ‘em in the Hall of Fame, at least another dozen heading there, and a handful of guys who crash-landed their own glide paths to Cooperstown. Seven struck me as particularly similar specimens to Sho; I defy you to find a more interesting group of baseball players than Mike Schmidt, Reggie Jackson, José Canseco, Daryl Strawberry, Eric Davis, Dale Murphy, and Fred McGriff:

NM  PA   R  2B 3B HR RBI SB/CS  BB  K   AVG  OBP  SLG OPS+

SO 1305 193 56 14 80 195 37/19 168 350 .265 .364 .554 151

MS 1372 225 58 15 76 208 29/17 204 271 .268 .385 .548 151

RJ 1202 171 53  4 57 192 31/16 135 236 .279 .368 .503 156

JC 1177 189 47  1 70 209 32/13 141 280 .256 .353 .512 145

DS 1181 170 53  4 68 178 40/18 146 232 .248 .341 .508 147

ED 1085 144 32  5 60 194 56/10 133 240 .277 .365 .515 146

DM 1385 244 47  6 72 230 53/15 183 244 .291 .386 .523 146

FM 1300 175 40  2 66 194  9/4  199 243 .289 .398 .512 150

That’s three Hall of Famers, two star-crossed high school bros from South Central, two of the nicer guys to ever play the game, one ‘roid rageaholic, one candy bar, and roughly 10,000 tabloid headlines. In the combined 16 seasons reflected in those numbers above, 14 received some Most Valuable Player votes (including 4 outright wins); there were also 12 All-Star appearances, 4 Gold Gloves, 4 home run crowns, 2 World Series rings, plus black ink (denoting league-leading performance) in a dozen other categories. This is an elite, potent, prime-age group, and Shohei Ohtani leads the lot of ‘em in homers and slugging percentage (and strikeouts and caught stealing).

So how’d this group do at age 28? Five of the seven received MVP votes, four were All-Stars, two led the league in homers, two won World Series rings. But also: Mike Schmidt had his worst full season (though hit his peak immediately after), Canseco accelerated his tumble from elite player to journeyman, and Davis was on the verge of being reduced by injury to part-time status:

NM  PA   R  2B 3B HR RBI SB/CS  BB  K   AVG  OBP  SLG OPS+

MS  616  93 27  2 21  78 19/6   91 103 .251 .364 .435 122

RJ  604  90 25  1 29  93 25/5   86 105 .289 .391 .514 166

JC  253  30 14  1 10  46  6/6   16  62 .255 .308 .455 106

DS  621  92 18  1 37 108 15/8   70 110 .277 .361 .518 140

ED  518  84 26  2 24  86 21/3   60 100 .260 .347 .486 123

DM  691  94 32  8 36 100 19/7   79 134 .290 .372 .547 149

FM  632  79 30  4 35 104  8/6   96 108 .286 .394 .556 165

Still, a pretty thumpin’ bunch. It’s good to enter your age-28 season resembling some of the more compelling hitters in Major League history. I don’t know that there’s a big predictive element here -- Shohei so far lacks the nagging injuries of Davis and Canseco at this point in their careers, seems to be a more even-keeled McGriff/Murphy type than a José/Daryl flameout candidate, and resembles most both physically and numerically the 500-HR-club members Schmidt and Reggie, minus their prickly arrogance.

And oh yeah, he pitches.

Pitching comps are generally harder to compile, due to much greater variance over time in usage trends, and more susceptibility to injury (including the types of injury that change the fundamental nature of performance; see Tanana, Frank). All of the Shohei-specific complications bedeviling his offensive comparisons also apply to pitching, with the added weirdness that he starts every six days instead of five.   

Still, I found seven dudes who plausibly match, after tweaking the parameters to include pitchers who threw between 200 and 400 innings at ages 26-27, with ERA+s between 141 and 170. Without further ado, meet Jake Peavy, Rich Harden, Mike Clevenger, Kyle Hendricks, Johnny Cueto, Adam Wainwright, and Tanner Roark:

NM  YEARS   W  L ERA  ERA+ IP   H/9 W/9  WHIP  K/9 K/BB WAA 

SO 2021-22 24 11 2.70 156 296.1 6.9 2.7 1.045 11.4 4.26 7.7

JP 2007-08 29 17 2.68 146 397.0 7.1 2.9 1.113  9.1 3.20 7.1

RH 2008-09 19 11 3.05 145 289.0 6.8 4.0 1.197 11.0 2.75 5.2

MC 2017-18 25 14 3.05 145 321.2 7.2 3.6 1.191  9.6 2.71 5.5

KH 2016-17 23 13 2.51 170 329.2 7.3 2.3 1.068  8.0 3.49 6.2

JC 2012-13 24 11 2.79 145 277.2 8.1 2.2 1.145  7.2 3.30 4.3

AW 2008-09 30 11 2.84 146 365.0 8.3 2.5 1.200  7.5 3.03 5.9

TR 2013-14 22 11 2.57 146 252.1 7.7 1.8 1.065  6.3 3.56 4.6

No Hall of Famers, though Wainwright has a puncher’s chance. Because of the innings limit, there are a lot of nagging injuries reflected here; some of them on the verge of becoming major. Rich Harden, a massive talent with nasty stuff, threw enough innings to qualify for an Earned Run Average title exactly once in his nine-year career.

Still, those 16 seasons above contain some swag. Jake Peavy in 2007 led the National League in wins, strikeouts, strikeouts per 9 innings, and walks plus hits per inning, on his way to winning the Cy Young Award (one of five top-5 finishes on this list, as well as five top-30 MVP campaigns). Kyle Hendricks in 2016 led the NL in ERA and ERA+, while winning a ring with the Cubbies. Cueto and Waino each won 19 games. And of this accomplished group Ohtani leads in age-26/27 Wins Above Average, Wins Above Replacement, K/9, K/BB, fewest H/9, and lowest WHIP.

So how’d the gang do at league-age 28, which is what Ohtani is this year?

NM  W  L ERA  ERA+ IP   H/9 W/9  WHIP  K/9 K/BB  WAA 

JP  9  6 3.45 115 101.2 7.1 3.0 1.121  9.7 3.24  0.9

RH  5  5 5.58  81  92.0 8.9 6.1 1.663  7.3 1.21 -1.0

MC 13  4 2.71 174 126.0 6.9 2.6 1.056 12.1 4.57  3.1

KH 14 11 3.44 121 199.0 8.3 2.0 1.146  7.3 3.66  1.2

JC 20  9 2.25 163 243.2 6.2 2.4 0.960  8.9 3.72  4.6

AW 20 11 2.42 160 230.1 7.3 2.2 1.051  8.3 3.80  4.4

TR  4  7 4.38  91 111.0 9.6 2.1 1.306  5.7 2.69 -0.2

Cueto and Wainwright were Cy Young runner-ups, Clevenger was still beastly when healthy, Hendricks was healthy but mortal, Peavy was mortal and unhealthy, Roark was hurt and ineffective though he bounced back the next season, and Harden was toast. Pitching is hard, yo!

Again, the predictive element is dicey here, and only one arm injury away from being pointless. It’s better instead to look upon these comparables as tools to deepen the appreciation for Shohei’s artistry. What if Mike Schmidt pitched like Jake Peavy? That’s what the past two years have shown us.

After the supernatural magic of the World Baseball Classic, and at the start of the mother of all contract years, it seems unwise to take the under when it comes to projecting Ohtani’s upcoming season. All signs point to 2023 being The Year of the Sho. Happy Opening Day!