Law: Players I was wrong about, including Shohei Ohtani and Justin Steele

At the end of every season, I look at players who’ve succeeded in the majors beyond the expectations I had for them, and explain where my projections for those players went wrong. Sometimes it’s what I saw (or didn’t see), sometimes it’s a matter of incomplete information from sources, but regardless of the reasons, they’re my mistakes, and it’s on me to learn from them to improve my projections for other players who might show similarities to these guys in the future.

This year I’ve focused on four players where my evaluations of them prior to them reaching the majors, and in some cases even after they reached the majors. One thing all four of these players have in common is that they made substantial changes or adjustments to their games after their debuts, and in highlighting them here I’m also arguing that these changes are sustainable and that any projections for these players going forward would need to reflect that. Good for them, if not for me.

When the Nippon Ham Fighters posted Shohei Ohtani after the 2017 season, I was all-in on Ohtani as a pitcher, and saw plus-plus power and 80 speed as well, but I had real questions about whether he could hit enough to be a viable two-way player, given his approach and swing at the time as well as the massive amount of work required to be good enough at both jobs to make it worth a team’s while to keep him that way. Due in part to an elbow injury that cost him all of 2019 on the mound and all but 1 2/3 innings in 2020, he’s actually been more valuable as a hitter than he has as a pitcher during his MLB career, and good enough to be a star even if he had to give either of the two jobs up — not that we want him to do that. He is a unicorn, and while I could just hand-wave that away and call his emergence a black swan event, he’s gotten to this point, and made my original predictions for him very wrong, by making a lot of big and small changes to his game.

Ohtani was a star in Japan, but he had a high strikeout rate for a player of that caliber, striking out over a quarter of the time in his last two seasons in NPB, including a 27 percent rate in his age-22 season in 65 games for the Nippon Ham Fighters. Even absent information on the player’s swing or approach, that’s a very high strikeout rate for a player who’s looking to come over to MLB, where hitters face a higher caliber of pitching overall and strikeout rates tend to go up, not down. Masataka Yoshida, for example, has gone from an 8.1 percent strikeout rate over his last two years in NPB to 12.9 percent this year in his first season in MLB. Ohtani’s strikeout rate went up negligibly in his first year in MLB, but he kept his value up with a .350 BABIP and plenty of power. Since then, he’s improved almost every year as a hitter outside of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and in most ways his walk year in 2023 is his best season yet.

How did Ohtani prove me and any other skeptics around his bat…