Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani is a rare two-way hitting and pitching talent who only signed with the Los Angeles Angels a week ago, yet has been posing a dilemma to fantasy baseball developers for months.
In 2016 with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, Ohtani batted .322 with 22 home runs while also making 20 starts with a 1.86 ERA, and in the majors he will attempt to be both a starting pitcher and a batter (likely as a designated hitter with the potential for playing time in the outfield as well).
Fantasy baseball games in the U.S., however, are not designed to count both the hitting and pitching stats of the same player. No one since Babe Ruth in 1919 has made meaningful contributions as a regular two-way player. After all, one of the best hitting pitchers, San Francisco Giants’ Madison Bumgarner, has a career .185 batting average that more than negatively offsets any advantage of his 17 career home runs.
Smaller fantasy sites such as FanTrax and RealTime Fantasy Sports will allow Ohtani to be used as either a hitter or a pitcher — although not both at the same time — none of the major players have yet committed to following suit.
Yahoo! is the first to tip its hand and will create two Ohtanis — one pitcher, one hitter — who will be drafted separately and participate in the game as two different players. Neither ESPN nor CBS Sports have decided, although CBS acknowledged two leading contenders: one Ohtani who can do either (just as FanTrax and RT Sports) or two Ohtanis (like Yahoo!).
Yahoo! product manager Guy Lake outlined for SportTechie his group’s five considered options before settling on the two Ohtanis, which he ultimately called a “business-slash-technical decision.”
“As a diehard fantasy baseball player — it’s my favorite fantasy game — I don’t love this option,” Lake said. “As the product lead for this unit, this is the right choice.
“We had a lot of passionate back and forth about this. The majority of the room did not want to do two Ohtanis, let’s be very clear about that, but that’s where we’re going to end up.”
Lake added this was a “forever decision” and that Yahoo! would not change its policy in future seasons.
CBS senior director of product management Brian Huss said his site will decide soon to be ready for fantasy baseball’s launch at the end of January, noting the dilemma is exciting both as a baseball fan and a product developer.
“It is a sea change to the system,” Huss said. “We have never dealt with a player who is a true asset as both a pitcher and a hitter anymore. They didn’t have fantasy back in Babe Ruth’s day.”
ESPN said in a statement that it was continuing to mull its options: “We are working through a plan for handling Shohei Ohtani,” an ESPN spokesman said. “Many factors go into the process — league types, scoring methods, Ohtani’s overall skillset, etc. — that make this challenging, but we will have a solution for ESPN Fantasy Baseball before the 2018 season.”
Wanting to be transparent about the process for the sake of fantasy players, Lake walked SportTechie through Yahoo!’s deliberations, and Huss provided insight into the plans at CBS.
1. One Ohtani who does both
Lake described this as both his “first choice” but also the “most technically difficult” — not impossible, by any stretch, but one that would take his best engineers three months to tackle. That would delay the launch of fantasy baseball and consume too much effort, at great opportunity cost, because of an intricate web of “back-end logical dependencies” in the program.
“It’s in so many different places and, to be honest, some of our code is quite old,” Lake said. “A lot of it’s very new, but some of it’s old. There are a lot of dependencies in between these different spots. And when you change things in one spot, there’s a chain reaction you have to take account for. It’s less that it would take all the time to code everything than it is to run extensive unit and functional tests against it to make sure it all works.”
In addition to the user experience, Yahoo! would have to account for the back-end statistical applications. When the game sees a player’s ID number, the program has codified assumptions about the array of stats to include, which would need to be changed. Furthermore, third parties like Rotowold and Rotowire are used for player notes, injury updates and projections, which would require proper mapping and syncing as well.
“Someone’s going to make a seemingly fair argument, Well, if you just started this in the summer, you’d be fine — true, if we didn’t have this thing called fantasy football we have to do,” he said.
CBS, on the other hand, has a particularly customizable product and is positioned to entertain this option of granting Ohtani just one roster spot but with eligibility at both pitcher and designated hitter. A fantasy owner could choose one or the other at the beginning of each scoring period — daily for some, weekly for others.
“That seems like a logical solution [because], well, he is one player and he should occupy one roster spot,” Huss said, noting that testing and prototyping is underway.
CBS also permits sweeping powers to league commissioners to modify stats; that means, Huss said, a commissioner in theory could manually input all of Ohtani’s hitting stats for a fantasy team who was using him as a pitcher (or vice versa).
2. Creation of a pitcher/hitter hybrid position
The development of new active lineup slot that would accrue pitching and hitting stats. Because lineups must be uniform across an entire league, this would mean that any pitcher could be placed in this position, meaning Bumgarner and other pitchers who make some offensive contribution could be placed there — although that number is very small.
While the Tampa Bay Rays’ No. 4 overall pick, Brendan McKay, is being developed as a two-way player and there are several hitters who have been converted to be pitchers, realistically almost no one would actually be inserted here.
“Logically, I get it, but when you think about it, you’ve created this highly specialized position that only one and maybe two people in your league could ever take advantage of,” Lake said.
3. Include batting stats for all pitchers
This would mean all pitchers, no matter who they are and what league they pitch in, would have their offensive statistics counted for the fantasy team’s total. This was a non-starter for both Lake and Huss.
“That’s such a radical rethinking of the game that I just wasn’t comfortable with it at all,” Lake said.
4. Two Ohtanis
This is the tenable and palatable decision from Yahoo! — and a consideration by CBS — that allows fans to benefits from his unique skill set while not requiring a massive game renovation for just one player.
5. Pick one position
This do-nothing option — except for deciding whether Ohtani would count as a pitcher or hitter — also required just a fleeting decision by Yahoo!.
“It absolutely was not going to happen,” Lake said. “It’s the lazy way out. I don’t expect any of the providers to do that.”