Shohei Ohtani had general managers scrambling this winter with his jump to the major leagues.
They weren’t alone. For folks who write the code that tracks stats for fantasy baseball websites, Ohtani’s two-way talents have caused quite a conundrum.
At for CBS fantasy baseball headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Eric Chylinski and his team nearly ran their markers dry filling whiteboards with formulas and ideas about the Japanese star. As director of marketing and fantasy product, Chylinski was among those charged with solving the Shohei Ohtani dilemma.
“We’ve never had one player cause such a shift in our workflow,” Chylinski said.
With his ace-level arsenal and prodigious power, Ohtani has the tools to become an unprecedented fantasy baseball star — but only if the game can adapt to accommodate him. The quandary faced by Chylinski and others: How does a game predicated on separating hitters from pitchers account for a player who can do both?
Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles Angels in early December and formally announced his intent to pitch and hit. Two-way play isn’t unheard of in the majors — Brooks Kieschnick did it with the Brewers in 2003 and ’04, and Padres catcher Christian Bethancourt experimented with it last year — but nobody in the fantasy baseball era has done both at a level that would warrant interest from fantasy players. Even homer-hitting pitchers like Madison Bumgarner don’t generate enough offensive power to provide fantasy value, which is why leagues usually disregard pitchers’ offensive stats entirely.
“With Ohtani, it’s different,” said RotoWire.com President Peter Schoenke. “He’s an international superstar. He could be the two-way player everybody wants.”
Everyone except perhaps fantasy programmers.
Fantasy baseball — and the software that supports it — is structured on the idea that baseball has two types of players: hitters and pitchers. Batters earn points for stats like home runs, RBIs and batting average. Pitchers contribute with figures like wins, saves and ERA.
What happens if one player becomes a worthwhile contributor on both sides?
“There are millions of lines of code, and you’re putting in an exception for just one player,” Schoenke said. “It gets tricky.”
At CBS, Chylinski and his staff spent weeks weighing options, polling users and implementing new software. They decided their best move was to rewrite the site’s code to support Ohtani as a hitter or a pitcher, but not both at the same time. That means owners who draft Ohtani can slot him as either a batter or a pitcher for each scoring period, but they’ll only get credit for his contributions on that side of the ball. ESPN has implemented an almost identical system.
“We explored all of the options we could think of and solicited feedback from our users as well as our analysts,” Chylinski said. “In the end, the one player approach was by far the most popular.”
There are drawbacks to CBS’ plan. If Ohtani hits a home run and throws seven scoreless innings on the same day, frustrated owners will only get points for one of those feats.
In leagues where owners set their lineups only once per week, Ohtani’s two-way value will be basically nullified, since players won’t be able to move him back and forth from their lineup to their rotation on start days. Both CBS and ESPN allow league commissioners to manually adjust scoring if they want to credit Ohtani for both, but fantasy owners who spoke to The Associated Press didn’t plan to do that.
“I think not designating whether Ohtani is solely a pitcher or hitter is going to cause a lot of chaos in my league, especially if a team loses a close game because of him,” said fantasy commissioner Roberto Macias said. Macias adds that several owners in his weekly league want to make Ohtani eligible as a pitcher only, in part because they’re skeptical of his hitting ability.
Yahoo has taken a different approach: creating two distinct Ohtanis — one a pitcher, one a hitter. The same player doesn’t have to draft both, meaning Ohtani could be split between teams.
“Our engineers would have needed to substantially rebuild the fantasy product,” to create one Ohtani, wrote Yahoo’s Andy Behrens in a statement in December.
“This would have been an enormous undertaking, disrupting other initiatives and delaying the game. And in the end, Ohtani’s owners still would not have received 100 percent of his stats.”
Yahoo’s programmers aren’t alone in opting against a program re-write. The National Fantasy Baseball Championship is only allowing users to draft Ohtani as a pitcher.
If Ohtani legitimizes himself as a two-way fantasy threat, the ideal scenario for owners is that his hitting and pitching stats are both tracked, regardless of where he is in the lineup. For fantasy sites, though, that would mean a complete restructuring of the software to track batting stats for all pitchers. Start going down that road, and owners might be able to get a boost from slugging pitchers like Bumgarner, too.
Schoenke, who is also chairman of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, said sites didn’t have time for that undertaking between December and opening day.
Expect that to change if Ohtani — or perhaps Tampa Bay Rays two-way prospect Brendan McKay — emerges a fantasy-worthy talent on both sides. If Ohtani can win 20 games and hit 40 home runs, users are going to demand sites like CBS, ESPN and Yahoo undertake a massive system re-write.
“People in fantasy baseball are secretly rooting that he doesn’t make it as a hitter so it can kind of go back to what it was,” Schoenke said.
Of course, all the anxiety and excitement over Ohtani could be for naught. He entered Sunday with an ERA of 27.00 and a batting average of .107 in spring training, heightening skepticism that the 23-year-old can actually become a two-way star.
Fantasy fanatics like Schoenke are still dreaming, though. In the past, the most a player could help your team in a standard league was in five categories — five for pitchers, five for hitters. But a 10-category player?
“That throws a wrench in everything,” he said.
