Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels is on pace to be a unanimous American League (AL) MVP this year.
He finally broke through the 9 WAR mark.
According to the WAR (bWAR) rankings updated by Baseball-Reference, a major league statistics organization, on Tuesday, Ohtani remained atop the leaderboard with 9.0 WAR. He’s the only player in the entire league with a “9” this season.
Baseball Reference defines WAR (Wins Above Replacement) as “a number that indicates how many wins a player contributes to a team over and above the number of wins a replacement player could contribute. In this context, replacement players are a collection of players with Triple-A or Quadruple-A level skills, which is the line between the minor leagues and the major leagues.
Baseball Reference categorizes players with a season WAR of 8 or more as MVP caliber, 5 or more as All-Star caliber, 2 or more as a starter, 0-2 as a reserve, and 0 or less as a developmental player.
As of today, Ohtani is the only player with an MVP-caliber performance. The Angels still have 46 more games to play, but that means he’s already made MVP-caliber contributions.
Ohtani started the game against the San Francisco Giants at Angel Stadium and pitched six innings, allowing one run (unearned) on three hits and three walks in a 4-1 victory.
Ohtani, who improved to 10-5 on the season, lowered his ERA to 3.17 while increasing his strikeouts to 165. He is tied for sixth in the AL in wins, fourth in ERA, third in strikeouts, seventh in WHIP (1.06), and first in batting average at 0.185. Most notably, he posted double-digit wins for the second straight year.
Ohtani went 2-for-2 with a walk and a run scored to finish with a .306 (130-for-425) batting average, 40 home runs, 83 RBIs, 89 runs scored, a .410 slugging percentage, a .666 on-base percentage, a 1.076 OPS, and 283 RBIs. He led both leagues in home runs, on-base percentage, OPS, and RBI.
If we were voting for MVP right now, Ohtani would get all the first-place votes. In fact, in a mock poll conducted by MLB.com on Sept. 9, all 48 journalists and commentators who participated cast their first-place votes for Ohtani.
At his current pace, Ohtani is on pace to post a bWAR of around 12.0 this season. That would be a career year, well above his numbers from 2021 (8.9) and last year (9.6), when he was unanimously named his first career MVP.
Last year, the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge tied the AL single-season home run record with a 10.6 bWAR and swept the MVP voting, winning 28 of 30 first-place votes to surpass Ohtani.
This year, there’s no one to catch Ohtani, as the second-best overall bWAR player is the San Diego Padres’ Ha-Sung Kim with 5.9. Third is Atlanta Braves slugger Ronald Acuña Jr. (5.9), who is cruising toward 30 homers and 60 doubles, and fourth is Los Angeles Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman (5.3).
Ohtani’s bWAR is 5.5 as a hitter and 3.5 as a pitcher. He is first in the AL as a hitter and third as a pitcher. His batting total is 9.0, which ranks first overall.온라인카지노
Meanwhile, Ohtani’s fWAR, as calculated by another statistical source, Fangraphs, is 8.1 (5.8 as a hitter and 2.3 as a pitcher), which is 1.8 higher than the second-place finisher, Acuña Jr. (6.3). The difference is smaller than bWAR.