By Robert Whiting
YUKAN FUJI (2018)
ESPN analytics whiz Sam Miller did an extensive evaluation of Shohei Ohtani, 2018 Rookie of the Year, as a batter and came to the conclusion that the MLB player most like is former Baltimore Orioles slugger Boog Powell, Powell, 6’3” 235 pounds in the prime of his playing days, was a line drive hitting first baseman who averaged 30 homers a year, .300 100 RBI’s at his MLB peak. (339 overall in 17 years with BA of .266). Like Ohtani, he was capable of hitting 500 foot home runs. Boog Powell came to Japan in the post season of 1971 with the Baltimore Orioles. At age 24, Ohtani’s age next year, Powell hit .287/.372/532 , with 34 homers, 109 RBI’s andfinished third in MVP voting. He was also a four-time all-star.
As a pitcher, Miller compared Ohtani to young Tim Lincecum, who was 18-5 with 2.61 ERA and league leading winning percentage of .783 , at age 24. Lincecum stood 5’10” and weighed 160 pounds, He won multiple Cy Young awards, thew multiple no-hitters and won multiple World Championships with the San Francisco Giants. Linceum was a bit smaller than Ohtani but resembled Ohtani in many ways, in how hard he threw the ball. Wrote Miller, “Lincecum does not so much throw a ball as he launches it, 98-miles per hourrockets expelled, with finely tuned kinetic energy, from a bat boy’s body. It frightens …traditional baseball people that someone so lithe can throw 98 miles per hour.”
Lincecum’s arm went bad by the time he was 30 and won only 110 games in total, but at his peak, was among the best there was.
The two players are not Hall of Fame material individually. But when you combine the talents of Boog Powell and Tim Lincecum into one package, in the form of Shohei Ohtani, it is indeed Hall of Fame material.
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There is another player Ohtani reminds me of: Willie McCovey, the great San Francisco Giants slugging star of the 1960’s and 70’s, who recently passed away. McCovey was 6’4” tall, weighed 200 pounds and had strikingly long legs. Ohtani is 6’4”, weighs 200 pounds and has noticeably long legs. McCovey was a lefthanded batter who hit 500 foot home runs. Ohtani is a lefthanded batter who hits 500 foot home runs. McCovey made the Hall of Fame after 22 years in the major leagues. Many people are predicting that’s where Ohtani will eventually wind up. But that, of course, remains to be seen.
Willie McCovey was one the most intimidating power hitters of his era. He hit a total of 521 home runs in his career, more than any other left-handed hitter until Barry Bonds came along. His nicknames were ‘Big Mac’and ‘Stretch,” the latter a reference to how far hecould extend his body to catch a throw from his first base position. ’ For many years he hit at the heart of the Giants batting order with another Hall of Famer, Willy Mays. The pair comprised the most fearsome 3-4 spots in a batting order in the history of major league baseball In 1969, McCovey was the National League MVP when he hit 45 home runs with 126 RBI’s and a batting average of.320. McCovey was noted not just for his batting prowess but for also for how hard he hit the ball. His home runs seemed to go father than others and his line drives were more wicked than anyone else. .Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson and Bob Gibson called McCovey ‘the scariest hitter in baseball.” Said Dodgers manager Walter Alston of a certain vicious line drive McCovey had hit, “It seemed like an Act of God,”
McCovey is remembered for making the last out in the 7thgame of the 1962 World Series versus the New York Yankees at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. With the Giants trailing 1-0, two out and runners on second and third base in the bottom of the 9thand down by a run, a single would have won the World Championship for the Giants McCovey lined a screaming line drive but right at theoutstretched glove of Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson. Three feet higher and the Yankees would have gone home.
McCovey was a hero of mine growing up in Northern California. I saw him play at Candlestick Park. I also saw him play in Japan in 1970 when the SF Giants underwent spring training in that country as the guests of the Lotte Orions. McCovey hit a home run so far off of pitcher Masaki Kitura that the chagrined hurler beat a hasty retreat to the dugout, arriving even before before the ball had evenlanded on the other side of the fence 500 feet away. At the time, there was no one as big or as McCovey in Japanese professional baseball. But that changed, as evidenced by Shohei Ohtani.
McCovey, a quiet, shy man, like Ohtani, spent his final years in a wheel chair—a result of two arthritic knees that required several surgeries. This year he developed an infection that led to his death in October.
In 1996 McCovey plead guilty to federal tax fraud charges, for failing to report about $70,000 in revenue from sports card and memorabilia sales. He was given two years of probation and fined $5,000. He received a pardon from President Barack Obama in2017.
Let’s hope that Ohtani can live up to the example Willie McCovey set on the field…and stay out of trouble off of it.
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ALARM BELLS: The World Series in 2018 featured two legacy, large market teams in MLB, the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers . The 5 game series, won by Boston, averaged 14,125,000 viewers on Fox Television, a drop of 25% over the previous years. The games averaged a rating of 8.3 and a share of 17, this too down from last year’s Houston-Los Angeles series, which draw a 1-.7 rating, 20 share and 18.9 million average viewers over 7 games—won by Houston. Overall viewership for 2018 World Series was down 40% from the Chicago Cubs seven game victory over the Cleveland Indians in 2016.—in what was the Cubs first World Series championship since 1908 and sent Chicagoans into paroxysms of joy.
The worst rated World Series was the four game sweep of Detroit by San Francisco in 2013, with a total of 12.7 million viewers and a rating of 7.6.
The ratings stand for the percentage of US TV household that tune into the program while shares represent the percentage watching among those households with television sets actually in use at the time.
The World Series the fewest average viewers was San Francisco’s four-game sweep of Detroit in 2012 (12.7 million) and a 7.6 ratings.
Boston’s 5-1 win in Game 5 on Sunday was the most-watched game of the Series, averaging 17,634,000 viewers. The opener averaged 13,800,000, followed by 13,507,000 in Game 2, 13,250,000 in Game 3 and 13,563,000 in Game 4.
This is in line with the general downward trend in attendance which we discussed in an earlier column. Six straight years of downward movement , falling nearly 9 million fans a year. People are tired of seeing strikeouts, home runs or long fly balls, which is what baseball has become boring and predictable. Sophisticated new defensive shifts based on advanced analytics are forcing batters to hit the ball in the air and pitchers are accommodating them by throwing every pitch above the belt.
Fewer ground balls means fewer infield plays, thereby diminishing one of the great joys of the game. The result: swings and misses, strikeouts and home runs. The average time between balls is play is at an all-time high of nearly four minutes. Games are using up more and more time, lasting an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes—almost as long as NPB Games. This is over half and hour longer than they were 30 years ago. Such baseball is putting the fans to sleep.
Tokyo Junkie 