2023 MLB trade deadline: In keeping Ohtani, the Angels are gambling on their ability to change their fortunes
The Angels were expected to accept their fate. Instead, they're choosing to believe postseason odds are malleable
The appetite is insatiable, and the willingness tireless, and the merit unmatched, and yet, still, the public at large knows so little about Shohei Ohtani, the man behind the superlatives.
By virtue of being the most interesting man on the baseball field, Ohtani is a subject of abject fascination. The baseball universe will gladly gobble up even a crumb of distinguishing biographical information, but we especially lack any insight into how Ohtani himself feels about the truly singular position he holds as the eye of a storm that has consumed the sport. He speaks to the media infrequently, and when he does, he displays yet another unparalleled ability to politely say nothing revelatory at all.
And so we’re left to interpret what he does.
For instance, how does Ohtani feel about the fact that after weeks of breathless speculation that he could be the most valuable rental ever traded at the deadline, the Angels emphatically committed to keeping him for the remainder of the season by making moves that make sense only if you’re desperate to be the team that takes him to the postseason?
Well, I don’t know. But not 24 hours after the Angels acquired one of the top available starting pitchers in Lucas Giolito, Ohtani, whose production this year has been better at the plate than on the mound, delivered the best start of his major-league career. For the first time since leaving Japan, he threw a complete game, with a one-hit shutout in the Angels’ 6-0 victory in the first game of a doubleheader against the Tigers. In the second game, an 11-4 Angels win, he hit his league-leading 37th and 38th home runs.
Shohei Ohtani out here blasting homers like he didn't just fire a shutout an hour ago. pic.twitter.com/gT4KGTlnz3
— MLB (@MLB) July 27, 2023
Despite what anyone else might think, the Angels believe they can bolster their current team enough to contend this year. They’re willing to act irrationally, maybe even irresponsibly, to build something worthy of holding onto Ohtani. In return, he seems to have redoubled his commitment to doing everything in his power — which is a whole lot — to reward that effort.
As our ability to quantitatively determine not only the most likely outcome in various sports scenarios but also how the specific magnitude of that likeliness has grown, so has the importance of the pithy corollary to explain unexpected outcomes: That’s why they play the games.
Or, as it applies to a particular team’s moves around the MLB trade deadline: That’s why they’re made by passionate, fallible, motivated people in a context-rich world that goes beyond even the many factors included in the most sophisticated models. The algorithms, for instance, don’t know that the Angels under Arte Moreno would do almost anything to get to a postseason while they still employ Ohtani. That kind of dedication might be enough to shift the odds in their favor, assuming the computers can’t factor in whatever unique affliction has festered in Anaheim over the past decade.
It’s Taking Stock Time in Major League Baseball. Ostensibly a chance to change your fortunes, the trade deadline instead tends to function as a force by which to cement them. Teams that are postseason-bound are presumed to be the most aggressive in pursuing fortifications at the expense of those totally out of it, while teams on the cusp act more conservatively to hedge their bets.
The last time the Angels played in the postseason was 2014. Mike Trout was 23 years old and finishing the first of what would be three MVP seasons. He hit a lone ineffectual home run as the Angels were swept out of the division series, and nearly 1,000 regular-season games later, the longstanding best player in baseball still has just that one hit in the playoffs.
At no point was it the Angels’ plan to sit out the postseason for a single year, let alone nearly a decade. Here’s what preseason predictions and results looked like for the Angels in each of those years:
Fangraphs didn’t have postseason odds yet in 2015, but Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system projected the Angels to win the division, so let’s assume they would’ve been fairly high. The team finished above .500 (the most recent season in which they’ve done so) but third in the AL West.
Ahead of 2016, Fangraphs gave the Angels a 26.5% chance of making the playoffs. They finished 74-88.
Before 2017, Fangraphs had their odds at 33.3%. They went 80-82.
Ahead of 2018, Ohtani’s Rookie of the Year season, their odds were at 27.1%, and again they finished 80-82.
In 2019, their preseason playoff odds fell to 19.5%, and they lost 90 games and finished 35 back in the division.
With 2020’s shortened season and expanded playoffs, the Angels’ preseason odds were 32.6%, but even a 16-team field wasn’t big enough.
In 2021, Fangraphs gave the Angels a 39.5% chance of making the playoffs. Ohtani turned in an MVP season, and again they finished below .500.
Last year, they had a 44.7% chance of making the playoffs and reached mid-May in first place, but a 16-36 June and July spiral knocked them out of contention.
Yet the algorithm remained undaunted. After a savvy winter — ESPN, the Athletic and Bleacher Report all gave the Angels a B+ for their offseason moves — Fangraphs put the team’s chances of making the postseason in 2023, Ohtani’s final year under contract, at a relatively lofty 48%.
By the time the All-Star break ended, those odds had sunk to 10.8%. The deadline was just a few weeks away, and the under-.500 Angels were third in the division and five games back of the final wild card, with six teams ahead of them. Trout, playing at a still-All-Star but career-worst level, had surgery earlier in the month on a fractured hamate in his left hand. Turn on any sports talk radio or television this month, and you could see someone insisting that not trading Ohtani, given the circumstances and his impending free agency, would be baseball malpractice. Essentially every outlet that covers the sport considered what a return for a few months of Ohtani might look like.
As of mid-July, the Angels as constructed were unlikely to make the playoffs (again), and as such, they were expected to accept their fate and abdicate Ohtani. If they had swooned in the weeks since, perhaps they would’ve been forced to go down that path. But instead, the Angels have gone 9-3 since the break, including the Ohtani-led doubleheader Thursday. They’ve climbed above .500 and, at 54-49, and sit within three games of a wild card. That, apparently, was enough for Moreno and general manager Perry Minasian to see their team's odds — up to 16.3% the day before the Giolito trade and 21.8% after Thursday's wins — not as a sentence but as something to be changed and the trade deadline not as a referendum but as a chance to do so.
The merits of that gutsy call will ultimately be judged by whether or not it works. Can a team do enough at the deadline to turn a perennial also-ran into a postseason darling? Would that be enough to convince Ohtani to re-sign with the Angels? The cost involved is more than merely looking delusional compared to conventional wisdom; the future of the franchise will have to be depleted to redirect resources to the here and now. That seems to be a risk the Angels are entering into with clear-eyed understanding.
“Whether it works or it doesn’t, I can go to bed at night and say, ‘You know what, we did this for the right reasons,’” Minasian told reporters Thursday. “We’re giving ourselves a chance.”
A chance to find out what happens now. That’s why they play the games.
