The future of Shohei Ohtani

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

His minor league cards show him as a second baseman. Trivia -- what HOF outfielder's RC shows him as a second baseman?

Are you talking about Yastrzemski's Rookie card? There are probably others.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by cgjackson222

Are you talking about Yastrzemski's Rookie card? There are probably others.

Yes.

[mrreality68]

This says it all

[Peter_Spaeth]

Call me old school but hard for me to get worked up about a guy batting .220.

[mrreality68]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Call me old school but hard for me to get worked up about a guy batting .220.

you are correct his batting average is bad but he is a career .253 batting average.
And this current era of baseball is more about power than average. And this is sadly the era when strike outs are very high amongst most baseball players and no one really cares.
Adam Dunn always gets blasted for his high strike outs and you do not year those some things nowadays

Matt Olson has 155 strikeouts(10th overall) on the season with weeks to go. Kyle Schwarber has 190 strikeouts(1st overall)

Peter alonso has 128(48th overall)

Almost all the top home run hitters this year accept the True Top Players have high strikeouts and below average batting average

[Peter_Spaeth]

Baseball has never loved guys like Dunn, Kingman, Rob Deer, Gorman Thomas, and so on and so on with high HRs, high Ks and low BA. Jeff you say it's more accepted now but is it? The overall impact should still be the same, whether you measure it by WAR or something else.

[G1911]

What gets me is that strikeouts are treated as if they are meaningless for a batter, a not very significant measure and it's okay to rack up 150-200 of them.

Yet, they are treated as very important, one of the most important measures, for a pitcher.

As this is a direct adversarial relationship, this doesn't make sense. If a particular outcome of a plate appearance is really important positively for a pitcher, it is really bad for a batter and vice versa.

I don't so much care that we either go back to not liking batter strikeouts or not, but this should be consistent.

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Baseball has never loved guys like Dunn, Kingman, Rob Deer, Gorman Thomas, and so on and so on with high HRs, high Ks and low BA. Jeff you say it's more accepted now but is it? The overall impact should still be the same, whether you measure it by WAR or something else.

I don't know that we can lump Pete Alonso into the group of high strikeout/low average folks you mentioned, just yet.

His career WAR of 17.6 in 4.5 seasons is already almost as high as the career totals for Dunn (17.9), Thomas (19.8), and is higher than Kingman (17.3), Deer (13.8).

This got me thinking though, so I put together the below table to compare and added a few other sluggers (Howard, Kiner, Ortiz, and Thome).

A few things jumped out: Alonso's Strikeout to At-bat rate of 26% is lower than most others. But his walk rate is per Plate Appearance is lower than all of them except Kingman.

His HR/AB is the highest, and is actually even higher this year at 8.9%.

What I fear is that because he is a very large man, he may not age well. And he started his career relatively late, getting to the majors at age 24. Thome is a large man who aged well, but many think he did Roids. Same for Ortiz.