Why Is Shohei Ohtani Struggling This Postseason?
Image credit: Shohei Ohtani (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
Seven games into his MLB postseason career, Shohei Ohtani is hitting .222/.344/.333. He has six hits, one home run, a caught stealing and a 37.5% strikeout rate (12 strikeouts in just 32 plate appearances).
He’s been underwhelming, at least by his exceptionally lofty standards. So what’s happened?
The easiest answer is probably nothing. We’re talking about a seven-game stretch. From August 4-11 this year, Ohtani had a seven-game stretch in which hit .138/.161/.448. He followed that up by hitting nine home runs in his next 18 games.
But if you’re digging further, what Ohtani is facing is an example of how much tougher the game gets for even the best hitters come the postseason. With that in mind, here are four things to consider as the Dodgers’ superstar works through his October slump.
1. He’s A Little Unlucky
I’ll try not to mention small sample sizes too frequently, but good luck and bad luck doesn’t even out over the course of a season for hitters. In a seven-game stretch, any mishits finding a hole or rocket shots that are gloved are going to play even more havoc with a batter’s stat line.
Statcast metrics project that Ohtani should be hitting .248/.366/.585 this postseason instead of the .222/.344/.333 he is hitting. If one fly out had turned into a home run this month, Ohtani would be hitting .259/.375/.406, and you probably wouldn’t be reading this article.
The biggest difference comes from a pair of long, well-struck fly outs. Ohtani had a 393-foot fly ball to dead center that ended up just a couple of feet in front of the 395-foot sign at Dodger Stadium, and he had a 385-foot fly out against the Padres that Jackson Merrill caught on the warning track. Both were well-squared-up outs.
If one of those two had hit the fence or especially if either had cleared the fence, Ohtani’s slash line would look significantly better. But those kind of breaks are part of baseball.
2. Lefties Are Getting To Ohtani
Like most lefthanded hitters, Ohtani prefers to hit against righthanders. Ohtani hit .322/.411/.717 with a 21.5% strikeout rate against righthanders this year, which led all MLB hitters in slugging percentage against righties. He’s a career .292/.385/.611 hitter against righthanders. If a righthander is on the mound, Ohtani feasts.
He’s a .288/.349/.518 hitter with a 23.2% strikeout rate against lefties this year. For his career, he has hit .260/.341/.498 against lefties.That’s still quite good, but if you can, you want to give Ohtani a steady diet of lefties to challenge him.
So far, teams have done that. During the regular season, Ohtani faced lefthanders in 34% of his plate appearances. In the postseason, it’s gone up (slightly) to 37%. He’s hit .250/.400/.438 with a 20% strikeout rate against righthanders this postseason and .182/.250/.182 against lefties with a 58.3% strikeout rate.
These are small samples, and a lot of Ohtani’s troubles can be explained by his inability to hit Tanner Scott and Sean Manaea. Scott faced Ohtani on four occasions in the Padres-Dodgers series and struck him out all four times. Manaea struck him out in two of three plate appearances and got him to pop out in another. Ohtani is 0-for-7 with six strikeouts against those two lefties and 2-for-5 with a walk and a strikeout against other lefties.
Analyzing batter-pitcher matchups makes for the the smallest of small samples, but in previous regular season matchups, Scott had held Ohtani to a single and walk in 10 plate appearances. Ohtani was a .111/.200/.111 hitter against Scott before this postseason. Manaea held Ohtani to two singles and two walks in nine regular season plate appearances for a .286/.444/.286 line.
When the Padres sent Adrian Morejon to battle Ohtani in the fourth inning of Game 1 of their Wild Card series, Ohtani singled.
Ohtani saw Scott later in that game and struck out. Scott struck him out in Game 2, as well, and then again in Game 3. When Ohtani got the chance to face Morejon again in the fourth inning of Game 4, he walked. Lefty Wandy Peralta saw Ohtani for the first time later in Game 4 and struck him out. Scott saw Ohtani for a fourth time in the eighth inning of Game 5, and he struck him out again.
The Mets are also trying to make sure Ohtani sees a steady diet of lefty relievers. Ohtani singled to drive in a run against David Peterson in Game 1. The Mets made sure he faced Danny Young in his next at-bat in the sixth inning. Young “won” by getting a long fly ball out, but Ohtani tagged a ball 393 feet, as mentioned above.
In Game 2 of the NLCS, Manaea, another lefty, did an excellent job against Ohtani.
3. Only The Best Starters See Ohtani A Third Time
The Dodgers bat Ohtani at the top of the order for a number of reasons.
For one, it gets him extra plate appearances in some games where the middle-of-the-order doesn’t get to bat in the final innings. But it also makes it more likely that Ohtani will face a starting pitcher a third time before he exits the game. As Baseball Reference’s splits note, Ohtani only faced a starting pitcher four times in a game twice all year; no team is letting Ohtani see anyone four times. But he did face a starter a third time in 129 of his 159 games played. He hit .395/.442/.798 in those situations with 23 extra-base hits (including 12 home runs).
In the postseason, Yu Darvish (twice), Michael King and Manaea have gotten to face Ohtani a third time. The other three starters have been pulled before then.
Teams are having plenty of success against Ohtani in the first inning. He is 0-for-7 with five strikeouts in the first at-bat of the game against starting pitchers.
Ohtani has gotten his revenge the next time up. He’s 5-for-7 with a home run with one strikeout in his second at-bat against a starter in the same game.
He’s 0-for-4 in a third at-bat against a starter, and he’s 2-for-9 with five walks against relievers.
4. Teams Aren’t Going To Let Ohtani Beat Them
Here’s the pitch plot against Ohtani this postseason, as gathered by Synergy Sports:
Notice how few pitches are in the strike zone?
Ohtani’s power is not something to be toyed with, so teams pitch him carefully at all times. During the regular season, 39.5% of pitches to Ohtani were in the strike zone , with another 16.8% just off the edge of the zone in the borderline range where sometimes a catcher can nab a called strike.
But in the postseason, only 27.7% of pitches Ohtani has seen are in the zone, with another 19.9% just off the edge of the zone. That means 52.4% of all pitches Ohtani has seen this postseason were well out of the strike zone, and almost three out of every four pitches he has seen were either well out of the zone or borderline pitches.
When pitchers go to secondary offerings, they are in the zone only 19.7% of the time this postseason. Teams are willing to walk Ohtani, but they aren’t going to let him get a good pitch to hit.
It hasn’t been a great postseason for Ohtani yet, but he doesn’t seem to be lost so much as teams have done a good job planning for him. A breakout could happen in any game.
