Archive for shohei ohtani

Heading into the season, the Angels announced that they’d be using a six-man rotation to help accommodate the arrival of Shohei Ohtani. Back in February, while noting that Angels personnel seemed well suited to an extra pitcher in the rotation, I nevertheless expressed some skepticism about the team’s capacity to pull it off.

So there is some kind of road map for a six-man rotation in Anaheim. Probability still suggests, however, that the experiment is doomed to fail. The Angels have only seven decent starting pitching options in their organization, and all of them have injury concerns. The odds that the Angels even make it to Opening Day with six MLB-caliber starting pitchers isn’t great. Once the ravages of hurling an object at high speed over and over take their toll, the team will be forced to use replacement-level pitchers.

We’re are now one-fourth of the way through the season, and the Angels have had to contend with some injuries. They’ve lost JC Ramirez for the year while also navigating around trips to the DL both for Parker Bridwell and Matt Shoemaker as well.

In spite of those injuries, the six-man rotation has been an unqualified success, unless you want to qualify whether they have actually had a six-man rotation. The team’s 3.2 WAR from its rotation ranks 11th in baseball, and the team is in the top half of baseball in ERA and FIP. Ohtani has been great, striking out one-third of the batters he’s faced with a 3.53 FIP that is nearly 20% better than league average. Presumed ace Garrett Richards has been the team’s fourth-best starter, but that isn’t a bad thing, as he’s striking out a ton of batters with an above-average ERA and FIP. Tyler Skaggs has been the club’s best pitcher, repeating his good start from early last year but without the injury that would sideline him for three months. Right behind Skaggs has been Andrew Heaney — who just struck out 10 batters last night — coming off of two injury-plagued seasons but has a superb 2.88 FIP in the early going this year.

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Three years ago, Kris Bryant ranked as the best prospect in baseball. Then 23 years old, Bryant had brutalized minor-league pitching the year before and destroyed the competition in spring training with nine homers and 17 total hits in 44 plate appearances. Despite a clubhouse that now included Jon Lester and manager Joe Maddon among others — part of the Cubs’ signal to the world they were ready to compete — Bryant was easily one of the best 25 players in the organization, probably among the top five, and eventually proved during the season he was Chicago’s best position player.

And yet, the Cubs opted not to start the season with Kris Bryant on the roster. Once Bryant had spent enough days at Triple-A to extend his team control by a year — to become a free agent after the 2021 season instead of the 2020 campaign — the future MVP received a callup to the majors.

Bryant is still the most famous and most obvious case of a team’s effort to manipulate player service time to the potential detriment of the on-field product, but it happened before Bryant, has happened since Bryant, and is likely to keep happening. This season, there are several prominent players who might be kept off their major-league rosters for a time so that the team might save money and gain control of the player for an extra season.

For those unfamiliar with how service time works in these instances, here it is briefly. Players achieve free agency once they have six years of service time. Although the season lasts 187 days, a player is considered to have played a full season if he appears on an MLB roster or disabled list for 172 days. In any season where a player hits the 172-day threshold, that counts as one season of service time. If a player belongs to the roster for fewer than 172 days, he must combine those days with days from another campaign to reach the official “full season” mark.

Kris Bryant’s case is a useful example of this work. In 2015, he was on the roster for 171 days. That time counts only as a partial season. In the last two years, Bryant has been on the roster for more than 180 days each year, and each of those seasons count as one year of service time. At the end of the 2020 season, Bryant will have five seasons and 171 days of service, one day short of the six seasons necessary for free agency. As a result, he will need to play in 2021 to become a free agent. An extended discussion of service time appears in the FanGraphs glossary.

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The Los Angeles Angels struck gold this offseason. The addition of Zack Cozart and Ian Kinsler to a core that already included Justin Upton (re-signed to a five-year deal in November), Andrelton Simmons, and the incomparable Mike Trout has created a collection of position players few other clubs can rival. Nor does this even acknowledge the club’s greatest stroke of fortune this winter — namely, the signing of coveted two-way player Shohei Ohtani.

Understandably, the team wants to protect its new 23-year-old star. Ohtani joins a rotation composed mostly of damaged limbs. Because of the fragility present here, the Angels are going to try something novel — namely, to employ a six-man rotation. Unfortunately, it probably won’t work.

There are good reasons for a six-man rotation, and Angels’ starters meet several of the relevant criteria for experimenting with one. First of all, the club lacks a true ace. Despite having never faced a major-league batter, Ohtani is probably the club’s best pitcher. Given his unique position, however, it makes sense that the Angels wouldn’t expect him to carry the load of a No. 1 starter.

Beyond Ohtani, the Angels don’t possess a pitcher who needs to start every fifth day. Allocating five of Clayton Kershaw‘s or Corey Kluber‘s or Max Scherzer’s to another pitcher would be bad for a team trying to win baseball games. The Angels don’t have a pitcher of that class, though. That makes a six-man rotation more feasible from a competitive standpoint.

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