In a Double Gut Punch, the Angels Lose Ohtani’s Pitching and Trout’s Hitting

The news last night out of Anaheim landed like a punch to the gut of every reasonable baseball fan: Shohei Ohtani has a torn ulnar collateral ligament and at the very least is done pitching for the season, thus ending perhaps the greatest campaign we’ve ever seen. And in a double whammy that shouldn’t be dismissed, the team announced that Mike Trout is heading back to the injured list after playing just one game following a seven-week absence due to a fractured left hamate that required surgery.

Set aside the money for a moment; obviously this carries ramifications for Ohtani’s upcoming payday, which I’ll get to below. And forget the playoffs. The Angels went all-in in advance of the August 1 trade deadline but have gone an unfathomable 5-16 this month, plummeting out of the AL Wild Card race like an anvil without a parachute. Their Playoff Odds were already down to 0.3% before they were swept by the Reds in a bleak doubleheader on Wednesday. Even if Ohtani and Trout had both played at their peaks over the season’s final 34 games, the team’s fate was sealed.

No, what really sucks is the prospect that one of the greatest, most transcendent runs in sports history is over, or at the very least suspended. Ohtani is currently hitting .304/.405/.664 with the major league lead in slugging, homers (44), and wRC+ (181) while also pitching to a 3.14 ERA and 4.01 FIP with a 31.5% strikeout rate. From 2021-23, he’s hit .277/.376/.586 for a 157 wRC+ with 124 homers while taking the ball roughly every sixth day and pitching to a 2.84 ERA and 3.24 FIP. Babe Ruth didn’t even try to mix pitching and hitting for that long or to that degree, and with apologies to Bullet Rogan, who did it in the Negro Leagues, nobody at the highest level of integrated baseball has ever done what Ohtani has done. Wins Above Replacement doesn’t capture the value he generates (at least in theory) by saving the Angels a roster spot, but by our version of the metric, he’s been worth 26.2 WAR over the past three seasons (15.2 offense, 11.0 pitching), including a career-high 9.5 last year and 8.6 so far this year. By Baseball Reference’s version, he’s been worth 28.2 WAR (14.0 offense, 14.0 pitching), with 9.6 in each of the past two seasons. By either reckoning, you can find higher WAR totals over a three-year span, but nobody has done it this way. He is a unicorn, one who is likely to be crowned AL MVP for the second year out of three.

That said, storm clouds had circled over Ohtani’s pitching for the past two months, a reminder of both the precariousness and the remarkable nature of his ongoing balancing act between pitching and hitting. Over a stretch of seven starts from the second half of May through all of June, he allowed more than three runs just once, but he left his June 27 start against the White Sox — a dominant one, with 10 strikeouts and one run allowed in 6.1 innings — due to a cracked nail on his right middle finger. Despite continued problems with the finger including a blister, he made each of his next three starts, one with a few extra days of rest due to the All-Star break, but allowed 15 runs (five in each) over 17.1 innings.

Then, a day after the then-surging Angels leaked the news that they were taking him off the trade market, Ohtani put together an absolutely magical pair of performances in a June 27 doubleheader sweep of the Tigers. He threw a one-hit shutout with eight strikeouts and a season-high 111 pitches in the opener, then went 2-for-3 with a pair of homers in the nightcap before leaving the game due to cramping.

Ohtani then left his August 3 start after four shutout innings against the Mariners due to cramping in his right middle finger and his pitching hand; even so, he homered later in the game. He threw six innings and allowed only one unearned run on August 9 against the Giants, but four days later, the team announced he would skip his next start due to arm fatigue. He didn’t start again until the opener of a doubleheader against the Reds on Wednesday, but after clouting a two-run homer in the bottom of the first inning, he faced just two batters in the second before leaving again due to what the Angels PR account termed arm fatigue.

Ohtani reportedly underwent the MRI that revealed the tear between the games of the doubleheader. Remarkably, he was back in the lineup for the nightcap anyway, and laced a fifth-inning double, after which he enjoyed a light-hearted moment with Elly De La Cruz at second base, with the rookie phenom playfully poking the two-way superstar and asking, “Are you real?”

Elly De La Cruz gotta check if Shohei is real ??@Angels | #GoHalos pic.twitter.com/JLcIHEhdr3

— Bally Sports West (@BallySportWest) August 24, 2023

The Angels being the Angels, they lost both games and then general manager Perry Minasian delivered the bad news, telling reporters, “We did imaging between games and he does have a tear, and he won’t pitch the rest of the year… We’re going to get a second opinion and go from there. It’s basically day to day. Obviously, he hit. But that’s where we’re at.”

It’s tempting to connect the dots between Ohtani’s intermittent availability since the start of July and his subsequent injury. It’s not entirely implausible that there was some effect if he was overexerting himself or otherwise altering his mechanics to compensate for his troubles. But it’s not as though anyone saw the pitcher’s mechanics as compromised, and according to Minasian, Ohtani never spoke of any elbow issues until Wednesday. “He never complained about anything; he just had cramps and was dehydrated,” said the GM. “But today was the day he came out of the game and said he had some pain in the elbow area. Today was the first day we’d heard of it.”

The severity of Ohtani’s tear is unknown at this writing; if it’s small, he may receive injections of platelet-rich plasma and stem cells to promote healing, though that remedy generally only kicks the can down the road as far as surgery goes, particularly for a pitcher whose fastball pushes triple digits. You don’t even need to ask Jacob deGrom about how that went, you can ask Ohtani himself. He first sprained his UCL in June of his 2018 rookie campaign, then after nearly three months of hitting but not pitching returned to the mound and lasted just 2.1 innings before departing. Soon afterwards, doctors recommended that he undergo Tommy John surgery, which he did in October 2018… after posting a 169 wRC+ with seven homers in 97 plate appearances as a DH in September.

In all likelihood, a second Tommy John surgery is on the table for Ohtani, which at the very least would cost him the 2024 season as a pitcher but give him ample time to prepare for a ’25 return to the mound, given the general trend of allowing longer recovery times for pitchers receiving their second TJS. Bryce Harper recently set a new standard for nonpitchers by returning to the field 160 days after undergoing TJS. In a 2018 study I did on infielders who had received the procedure on their throwing arms, 10 months was the average, but eight or nine wasn’t uncommon; if Ohtani had the surgery this week, a best-case scenario would place his hitter-only return in May or June of next season.

The elephant in the room is which team will be overseeing Ohtani’s rehabilitation, as he is about to reach the most anticipated free agency since that of Alex Rodriguez nearly a quarter-century ago. Prior to the injury, Ohtani was poised to set all kinds of records for single-year salary, average annual salary, and total contract value as some of the game’s biggest-spending teams vied for his services.

As for that contract, you’re excused if you want to jump off the ride here. The hit in the unicorn’s stock price isn’t the big news. At best we’re entering into an area where we must fully acknowledge the limitations of our WAR-and-dollars projection models, which generally start to break down at the top end of the pay scale, though this can cut in both directions. Nobody’s been paid more than the $43.3 million per year Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are currently making, which at the typical $8-million-per-win valuation amounts to a projection of 5.4 WAR, yet our preseason ZiPS projections forecast 14 players to match or exceed that level. On the other hand, the Mets and the teams of Aaron Judge, Manny Machado, and Trout himself — to use just a few examples — are paying premiums on their superstars that go well beyond the typical valuations because of the ancillary benefits of employing them.

With those caveats in mind, as well as the fact that we’re in the realm of speculation when it comes to the interplay between Ohtani’s pitching, hitting and rehabilitation, the hit to his potential contract could be massive. Via Dan Szymborski, here’s his pre-injury ZiPS projection as a hitter:

The ZiPS contract suggestion for that 26.8-WAR projection is $241 million over 10 years — and that’s without him doing anything but DHing. Projecting a three-month absence at the start of next season as he recovers from surgery, which has a ripple effect on his expected availability downstream, yields this:

That comes to 19.5 WAR and a projected contract of 10 years and $175 million, a drop of $66 million, or one (1) 2023 Orioles Payroll. On the pitching side, here’s Ohani pre-injury:

That’s a projection for 25.9 WAR, and a valuation of $219 million over 10 years for his pitching. Scrub next year, and add the ripple effects while assuming that yes, he can come back from a second TJ and still pitch well enough to justify the effort, and this is what you get:

That’s 10.3 WAR and a valuation of $72 million over 10 years, a difference of $147 million, a bit less than the current Mariners payroll. All told, if we take the model at face value while keeping the speculation to a minimum, that’s a drop in projected contract value from $460 million to $247 million, though again, the error bars here are sizable.

Unless we’re talking about the size of the charitable foundation that he leaves behind, I don’t think Ohtani is ever going to worry about money, and even after walking through this exercise for illustrative purposes, I don’t think we should, either. At the same time, it’s not fair to dismiss the impact of Ohtani’s standard-setting salary on future waves of free agents, particularly as owners continue to do their best to put drags on payroll. Still to these eyes, the thing to bemoan is the sidelining of the most incredible baseball talent we’ve seen in quite some time, perhaps ever. Maybe the human body wasn’t meant to sustain this combination of pitching and hitting, or maybe we just don’t deserve nice things. Either way, this news is heartbreaking.

And we haven’t even gotten to Trout’s injury, which friend Eric Stephen of SB Nation likened to “a twisting of the knife after the initial 47 stab wounds.” Trout was hit by a pitch on the left hand on July 3, and had surgery to remove the hamate bone two days later. He was expected to be sidelined for four to eight weeks, and returned in around seven. Though he went 1-for-4 with an infield single his lone game back on Tuesday, he felt pain in his left hand when hitting, and didn’t play at all in Wednesday’s doubleheader. He’s going back on the injured list, with the hope that with more rest he’ll be able to return this season.

The injuries have interrupted what had already been a comparatively forgettable season for the just-turned-32-year-old Trout, who’s hitting .263/.367/.490, for a career-low 135 wRC+. More unfortunately, this is yet another absence for a player who hasn’t been able to stay on the field for even 140 games since 2018, his age-26 season. He’s played in at least 100 games just twice in the five full seasons since then, and appeared in just 424 out of 674 of the team’s games since the start of 2019, which prorates to 102 games per 162-game season. He’s largely remained an elite performer in that span, hitting for a 167 wRC+ with 7.8 WAR per 650 PA, and produced 40 homers and 6.1 WAR in just 119 games last year. With three MVP awards and the fifth-highest JAWS among center fielders, he’s already a lock for the Hall of Fame, but these absences are costing him milestones, not to mention their impact upon the Angels’ chances of winning.

Between this pair of injuries and the others that have compromised this team even before this skid, the Angels’ bad luck is difficult to comprehend. It’s as though Moreno built this current team atop a cursed cemetery but only moved the headstones, leaving the bad vibes in place. But even if you don’t believe in curses or Poltergeist references, it’s difficult to conclude anything but that Thursday was a very dark day for baseball.