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The story
A pitching WAR ranking posted on a 5ch live-discussion board sparked buzz after it showed Shohei Ohtani sitting at 26th (3.0) — trailing not only league-leading Misiorowski (5.5) but also fellow DH-only player Alvarez.
The thread split over whether continuing the two-way career still makes sense, given Ohtani currently falls short of the qualifying threshold in both hitting and pitching, with talk spilling over into his run of consecutive 30-homer seasons alongside players like Schwarber, and the state of his knee.
What people said
1st: Misiorowski 5.5
26th: Ohtani 3.0
Hits more home runs than Ohtani, runs better than Ohtani, and fields better than Ohtani
Honestly, pretty much everything, no joke
He folds in clutch situations
Going two-way lowers your WAR.
Even back in 2022, when he qualified in both hitting and pitching, his WAR was lower than usual that year.
His career high also came in a DH-only season.
Two-way baseball is completely worthless and pointless — it just racks up injuries
The faithful love to fantasize and just add the numbers together, but two-way play really just debuffs both sides
Babe Ruth proved that a hundred years ago
It happened all at once
It's the knee… he ran too much during his 50-50 season
Even a bit lower, two-way is still amazing
He's just doing something absurdly roundabout to achieve what he could do the normal way — it's wasted effort
It's like taking a 100 km/h detour to arrive in the same 10 minutes you'd get just driving straight there at 60 km/h. Pointless
lol, that's a surprisingly clear analogy
So you don't rate utility players either then?
Say that to Yamamoto's face
AVG .248 17 HR 38 RBI OPS .907 (hasn't reached the qualifying threshold)
He's just been out hurt for like 3 months now, newbie (ニワカ, i.e. a casual/bandwagon fan)
PCA (Pete Crow-Armstrong) has played a full season and still has the higher wRC+, so Ohtani's flat-out losing on offense too
PCA's defense — historically great, even though some call it overrated — grades out about even with roughly 80 innings of Ohtani's pitching by the metrics
And on the bases, PCA blows him away completely
Is this guy a god or something?
There's about to be a third
AVG: .157
HR: 14
RBI: 47
OPS: .577
Unlike Judge, who's just hurt, this is genuinely brutal
Well, getting that while playing DH is basically a miracle in itself
Whether he's pitching or not, he's standing in as the DH at the plate, so there's no way it would be offset
After watching how last year went, only the true believers are still expecting that — plus he doesn't look like he'll even be able to pitch, and I can't picture him hitting any better than he has all season either
He's desperate enough to just ignore his own 'bad knee' storyline
You don't even need to ask that — it's just because he can't
Background and Key Points
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is a single sabermetric number meant to fold hitting, pitching, defense, and baserunning into one “value above a replacement-level player” score, but pitcher WAR and hitter WAR are calculated differently, and FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference versions can diverge sharply — a nuance that gets lost when a bare leaderboard screenshot circulates on a live-discussion board. Ohtani is the only player in modern MLB history to be an everyday DH and a rotation starter in the same season; he won AL MVP unanimously in 2023, then NL MVP in 2024 as a hitter-only after a second UCL elbow surgery kept him off the mound that year. His 2025 return to pitching only began in June, after a roughly two-year layoff, with the Dodgers deliberately capping his innings — which is why his raw pitching WAR total looks thin next to full-workload arms like Misiorowski.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t over Ohtani’s numbers themselves but over what two-way play is “for”: one side reads his WAR as proof that splitting time between the mound and the plate mathematically caps his ceiling on both sides, comparing it to Babe Ruth’s era; the other side argues the degree of difficulty is the value, and that docking him for attempting something no other modern player can sustain misreads the stat entirely.
What the thread never raises is that his innings limit this season is a workload-management choice tied to elbow recovery, not a sign of decline, and that Cy Young voting still leans heavily on traditional marks like wins and ERA rather than WAR alone — so a low WAR ranking doesn’t mechanically foreclose award consideration the way posters assume.
*This article is compiled as excerpts and a summary from the 5ch (Live Coverage G) thread “[Sad News] Shohei Ohtani Now Completely Out of the Running for Both the Cy Young and MVP lolololololololololololololololololol.”
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