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Ahead of the Los Angeles Dodgers' two-game road series against the Los Angeles Angels, there is much talk surrounding Shohei Ohtani's return to his MLB home for the first six seasons of his career. Ohtani, in the end, wasn't even given a legitimate offer by the Angels in free agency this past offseason, which made his decision to leave for the Dodgers that much easier.
His stint with the Angels didn't bear much fruit anyway in terms of winning. They failed to put together a season with a winning record while Ohtani was in town despite also having the services of one of the greatest baseball players of all time in Mike Trout, coming the closest to doing so in 2018 when they went 80-82.
While it's hard to pin the blame on a single player in a sport such as baseball, Shohei Ohtani couldn't help but be unfairly harsh on himself. The current Dodgers star wonders how different the Angels fortunes could have been when he was there had he been able to avoid the injury bug.
“There were seasons where we played well as a team but there were also seasons where I didn’t really play at all. And if I did in those situations, maybe the results would have been different,” Ohtani said, per Bob Nightengale of USA Today.
Perhaps this same perfectionism is what has driven Shohei Ohtani to become one of the greatest players the MLB has ever seen. But blaming himself isn't exactly fair. The Angels, simply put, did not do a good enough job of surrounding Ohtani and Mike Trout with enough talent up and down the roster to contend for a playoff spot.
Ohtani was worth 18.4 WAR (per Fangraphs) as a hitter alone from 2018 to 2023, and that was with an uncharacteristically rough 2020 season, while he added 12.0 WAR as a pitcher, giving him a total of 30.4 WAR during his stint with the Angels. But as a testament to their poor roster construction, the Angels went just 333-383 in games that Ohtani played in, which is good for a paltry 46.5 percent win rate.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers have gone 81-54 with Ohtani on the active lineup (60 percent win rate). That speaks volumes to the fact that the Dodgers have a much deeper roster from top to bottom, and has therefore set the 30-year-old Japanese international up for the kind of success he never had with the Angels.
Shohei Ohtani-Mike Trout dynamic duo not enough to carry the Angels
Shohei Ohtani became perhaps the most sought-after free agent in the history of professional sports this past offseason. After all, he has shown the ability to be an elite player both on the pitching and hitting side of the ball. The Dodgers then went all-in in their pursuit of the Japanese international, signing him to a 10-year, $700 million contract that set the record for the most expensive contract in sports history — thereby ending Ohtani's six-season stint with the Angels.
This is not to say that the Angels did not try to surround Ohtani and Mike Trout with talent. Prior to the start of the 2020 season, they signed infielder Anthony Rendon to a huge contract. That signing backfired, what with Rendon being extremely injury-prone and being mostly mediocre when he's on the field. Tying up that much money to a few players left the Angels financially hamstrung, left to scrounge for scraps to round out the starting rotation and unsurprisingly getting poor results.
But now, Ohtani is on an upward trajectory with the Dodgers; as fond as some of his memories with the Angels may be, he is best-served by forgiving himself for whatever shortcomings he thinks he may have had during his time with the Angels and looking forward to playing in the postseason for the first time in his career.
