At what point does he get considered for GOAT status? I mean, not necessarily now, but if he pulls this off for a few more years, he has to be at least mentioned at some point, right? The dude is like a build your own player with an unlimited cheat code.
He’s definitely putting himself in that conversation. He certainly needs a longer run, but these last 3 seasons are probably the highest all-around peak any player has ever had. As I noted earlier (and anyone can look it up), even Babe Ruth really didn’t slug and pitch at the same time. He was a great pitcher, but as he emerged as a hitter, he stopped pitching.
Probably the biggest question in his free agency is how long he projects to do both. He’s right in his prime right now, so certainly another 4-5 years near this level seem absolutely doable. After that, if doing both is taxing enough that he’s losing velo or bat speed, it may make sense for him to back off one side or the other.
As noted, Ohtani hasn’t done enough long enough to be considered GOAT yet, but his peak is getting really, really high. For this exercise, I’ll use bWAR (Baseball Reference WAR). For his career, Ohtani has 30.7 WAR, which puts him in 842nd place all-time, but he’s done that in 5.5 seasons and that also includes not basically not pitching at all in 2019 or 2020 and having the shortened COVID 2020 season offensively.
Since coming back from Tommy John surgery and resuming as a 2-way in 2021, Ohtani has put up WAR of 9 (4.9 hitting/4.1 pitching) in 2021, 9.6 last year (3.4 hitting, 6.2 pitching) and is currently on pace for close to 12 WAR this year (pace roughly 7 hitting/5 pitching), so while he’s not in the top 500 all-time, he’s going to pass a lot of guys very quickly if he continues playing like this.
Let’s assume (because if he falls off, he’s obviously not GOAT level) that he roughly keeps pace the 2nd half of this year and picks up another 5.5 WAR (getting him close to 12 for the season) and then has another solid 5 years into his early 30s where he’s a very good 2-way player. From there, assume he plays another 5 years and hits his aging curve and maybe even cuts one part of his game out (or maybe he’s a DH and reliever, something like that) and averages 4 WAR over those last 5 seasons.
Just his peak (what he’s done plus those next 5 seasons) would put him over 80 WAR, into baseball’s top 60, around guys like Rod Carew and Nolan Ryan. Adding those other 5 seasons as he winds down his career would bring him to north of 100 WAR into company of guys like Randy Johnson & Albert Pujols. Even just a couple more strong 2-way seasons could push him up into Lou Gehrig & Tom Seaver territory. One thing worth noting is that at all these milestones I’m noting, he’ll have played fewer years than most of the guys he’s near. This is his 6th season, but of course 2020 was abbreviated and he lost 2 seasons of pitching to TJ. The assumptions I lay out make for about a 15 year career, which is pretty great there, but some of the all-time WAR leaders played 20-25 seasons.
The 2-way is obviously his claim to any kind of GOAT status. He’s unquestionably the greatest 2-way player in history, but he’s not likely to be a top 15 all-time pitcher or a top 15 all-time hitter.…but the two together are adding value in ways never seen before.
Sorry if this was tl;dr
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