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.
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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.
Shohei Ohtani, DH/RHP
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 wrong? It’s not just one thing. I assumed that when I looked into his pitch-by-pitch data I’d see one or two smoking guns, clear areas where he improved between 2018 and now that explained how he went from a guy who as a rookie had a long swing and only hit right-handed pitching while striking out more than a quarter of the time to an elite hitter who is leading the American League in OBP, slugging, and home runs right now. I was wrong again — he’s done this via a whole host of adjustments, closing up one hole after another, or just changing his approach enough that pitchers had to find a new way to try to get him out.
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Ohtani’s entire swing was geared towards getting his arms extended so he could tap into his immense power and drive the ball, whether to pull or go the other way. This left him vulnerable to pitches inside, especially those down and in, and MLB pitchers attacked him there in year one because the swing said he’d struggle with those pitches. By year two, though, he’d already started to make that adjustment. In 2018, he chased those pitches down and in a ton, swinging at 37 percent of pitches in that region (zone 14 by MLB Gameday), and whiffed on them 20 percent of the times he swung. By the pandemic year, he’d cut those rates to 27 percent and 17 percent, respectively, and pitchers lost one of their best ways to attack him. He was also pretty bad against left-handed pitchers that first season, with a .222/.300/.354 line in a small sample (110 PA), since the Angels restricted how much he hit. In 2019, he improved across the board against lefties, and in each of the last three years he’s ranged from good to great against them. There were other weaknesses in his game as a hitter when he first came to the Angels; he had issues with changeups in that first year, whiffing on 44 percent of them, perhaps because in Japan the splitter is so common and the changeup far less so, but he learned to pick up the pitch by his second year and his swing and miss rate on that pitch has been less than 37 percent in every season since.
The one thing he didn’t do, making it all the more impressive that he’s improved his production so much, is cut down on his swing. He can cover the inner third of the plate better today, but he actually has swung and missed at pitches down and in more often in 2023 as he did in 2018, and he offers at them almost as often (34.6 percent). He’s actually whiffed at a higher rate in 2023 than he did in 2018, but brought his strikeout rate way down by taking called strikes about a quarter less often than he did in his first year here. And when he swings, he does damage — his soft contact rate is under 10 percent and consistently among the 10 lowest in baseball, while his barrel rates and exit velocity metrics are in the top percentile in the game. That last sentence is the other, hidden way in which my initial assessment, which I based on video, reports from scouts who’d seen him in Japan, and some limited data from NPB, turned out to be wrong — even with an elevated strikeout rate, Ohtani hits the ball so hard, and so squarely, that he could be productive even if he struck out 30 percent of the time. Very few hitters can offer that, and teams that chase this profile elsewhere may just be pursuing a chimera. There’s only one Shohei Ohtani. We may never see his likes again.
Justin Steele, LHP
I liked Cubs lefty Justin Steele when I saw him in the Arizona Fall League in 2018, and thought he could end up a fifth starter if he developed a third pitch, but he had a lousy 2019 season between poor performance and injury. Heading into 2020, I wrote, “Steele looked good coming back from Tommy John surgery in the fall of 2018, but struggled to start 2019 in Double A before an oblique injury ended his season in late June; he’s probably a two-pitch reliever at this point given his lack of success as a starter,” ranking him 19th in the Cubs’ system at the time. As recently as April 2022, he was still throwing a four-seamer with good ride but not much horizontal movement.
As my colleagues Sahadev Sharma (in a piece on Steele’s unique fastball) and Patrick Mooney (in a piece on how Jon Lester’s advice helped reshape Steele’s fastball) have written, Steele’s fastball is now closer to a cutter than a four-seamer, although it’s really just an outlier in its combination of cut, ride, and velocity, and the way Steele manipulates the pitch makes it function like two distinct offerings, allowing him to get away with having just one other pitch, a sweepy slider that’s among the best of its kind in baseball. He’s a two-pitch starter, which is feasible but less common than starters with three or more pitches, and has excellent command of that fastball-thingy.
Back in the spring of 2022, he was still just four-seamer/slider, and right-handed batters had crushed him in his major-league debut in 2021, with a .264/.347/.494 line that included 11 homers in 197 PA, consistent with his huge platoon split in his minor-league time in 2019. Changing his fastball gave him that weapon he needed against righties, and after that fateful text from Lester, Steele also started throwing more strikes, cutting his walk rate and boosting his overall strike rate from 60 percent in April and May of 2022 to 65 percent afterward. Two pitches, each elite in its class, one of which plays like two pitches itself, and plus command and control? Sounds more like a Cy Young contender than a guy you hope is a fifth starter.
Kyle Bradish, RHP
Kyle Bradish was one of four pitchers the Orioles acquired from the Angels way back in December of 2019 for right-hander Dylan Bundy, none of whom projected as more than a big-league reliever. For three of the pitchers in the trade, that’s been the case; Isaac Mattson threw just four big-league innings in 2021, and neither Kyle Brnovich nor Zach Peek has reached the majors. Bradish was the best of the four at the time, but had a very high arm slot, coming almost straight over the top, that inhibited his command, his ability to work east-west, and even his ability to turn over a changeup. About two months after the trade, he did not make my Orioles top-20 list, and I noted the high arm slot and visible effort in the delivery as reasons why he’d end up a reliever.
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In 2021, he debuted in the Orioles’ system and pitched well for Bowie, but with the same high slot and too high a walk rate. By the end of 2022, however, his delivery had already begun to change, the result not of any overt attempt by Baltimore to overhaul his mechanics, but work on improving his posture throughout the delivery as well as getting him to an arm slot and release height that would allow him to lean on his sinker rather than his four-seamer. He’s changed his fastball mix this year, throwing almost as many sinkers as four-seamers, after throwing the four-seamer about 90 percent of the time he threw a fastball in 2022.
What’s still unusual about Bradish is that he uses a breaking ball — both a slider and curve, in fact — to get hitters on the opposite side out. The curveball breaks mostly downward with below-average horizontal movement, but the slider breaks down and in to lefties and you’d think he’d run into some trouble if he leaves that pitch in the zone. So far, he hasn’t, as left-handers don’t seem to square the pitch up or even make that much contact even when he throws it for a strike. I do think that’s the one area to watch for possible regression, but at the same time, he’s worlds away from the pitcher I thought he’d be as recently as the middle of 2022, when the delivery changes weren’t as advanced and he was leaning too much on a four-seamer that even now is still his worst pitch.
Adolis García, OF
Adolis García had a breakout year in 2021, getting a regular opportunity in the majors for the first time — he had just 23 major-league PA before then — and hitting 31 homers, but with 194 strikeouts and a .286 OBP. It was more of the same last year, a few more doubles and four fewer homers, and a slight bump in his walk rate to get his OBP up to .300. It just seemed like this was who he was — a great defensive outfielder with speed and a power-over-hit approach at the plate, the sort of player whose value is capped by his low OBPs and can fall off a cliff pretty quickly if he loses any bat speed or any of his ball-strike recognition.
At age 30, however, he took another step forward, a bigger one in his approach, going from an unintentional walk rate of 5.8 percent last year to 9.7 percent this year, by cutting his chase rate dramatically from 37.3 percent last year to just 28.7 percent this year. It’s really about laying off the slider for García, as the pitch was his nemesis as recently as 2022, but before he went on the IL last week, he’d gone from chasing sliders out of the zone nearly half of the time (48.6 percent) to doing so less than a third of the time (30.9 percent). That’s a pretty substantial change for a 30-year-old, but it takes him from a useful but very flawed hitter to a bona fide All-Star. The only caveat I’ll offer here is that at his age, he’s not likely to hold this level for too long, and by the time he’s a free agent after 2026 his best years are likely to be behind him.
(Top image of Justin Steele (left) and Shohei Ohtani (right): Quinn Harris and Tim Heitman / Getty Images)
