Welcome to a new phase in the career of Shohei Ohtani. The extraordinary is now expected. Tom Verducci details how MLB’s most amazing player could be even better in 2022:
Ohtani could put up a better offensive season this year if Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon stay healthy. Last season Ohtani played only 17 games with those two in the same lineup. With Phil Gosselin and David Fletcher providing most of the protection behind him late last season, Ohtani hit .217 in his final 60 games.
If you counted all the pitches thrown at least 500 times by all the pitchers over the past four years you would get a collection of 1,406 unique pitches. The lowest batting average among those 1,406 pitches is the .075 batting average against the Ohtani splitter. More than his home-run power and more than his fastball, which averages 95.6 mph and 11 times last season reached 100, the splitter is what most separates Ohtani from his peers.
Ohtani almost always throws his splitter over the heart of the plate for the first 58 feet of its journey toward home, only to have it dive below the batter’s swing path. Almost all its deception is in its vertical path, which is why his catchers set up in the middle of the plate for it. But ever so rarely his splitter may cut or fade.
Splitters in general are devastating pitches because they essentially are changeups with late, less predictable movement. The average major league splitter spins 22% less than a changeup . The less a ball spins the more it is susceptible to the vagaries of air pressure passing over and under it. Splitters also are so hard to hit because hitters don’t see them often. Over the past 14 seasons, the rate of splitters has remained in a narrow range of between 1.4% and 1.8% of all pitches. Last season, for instance, Francisco Lindor of the Mets saw just 17 splitters all year, including just one in the team’s first 70 games.
“Because everything else he throws is really good, too,” Wise says. “He did have a start last year where he threw 55 in a game. He did alter the shape on that day, to just move the ball a little bit.
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