Trading for Shohei Ohtani Would Put Him on a WAR Path With History

Will the Los Angeles Angels trade Shohei Ohtani? It’s the burning question on the mind of pretty much everyone in baseball as MLB’s Aug. 1 trade deadline draws near. 

While I presented the case last week that the Angels should make a deal if they can get anything resembling a fair return — because the team is unlikely to make the playoffs and Ohtani will likely walk after the season as a free agent — it’s unclear whether Halos owner Arte Moreno is willing to trade the game’s greatest player during the best season of his career. (No pressure: It’s just one of the toughest decisions in the history of sports that could cement all of the comparisons people make between Ohtani and Babe Ruth.)

If the Angels part ways with Ohtani, his new team will be getting one of the highest-impact midseason acquisitions in the history of baseball.

Between his batting and pitching production, Ohtani has already racked up 6.9 Wins Above Replacement, which easily leads the majors this season. (Ronald Acuna Jr. of the Atlanta Braves ranks a distant second at 5.1 WAR.) Although Ohtani’s performance on the mound has slipped recently — he has a 7.71 ERA in July — Ohtani the hitter keeps mashing away. He leads the majors with 36 homers, including this missile he hit Sunday in what might have been his final home game as an Angel.

If he continues his per-team-game WAR pace over the rest of the season in a new uniform, Ohtani would join the ranks of the most valuable in-season pickups in MLB history. But he likely wouldn’t be the best ever.

The gold standard for dominant midseason acquisitions is CC Sabathia, who joined Milwaukee in a trade from Cleveland on July 7, 2008 and promptly put the Brewers on his back. In 17 starts for his new club, Sabathia went 11-2 with a 1.65 ERA and a 5.1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He ended up with 5.5 WAR for the Brewers, which easily led the team despite his playing only a half-season in Milwaukee, and he took a team that had just a 52% playoff probability on the day he was acquired to its first postseason appearance in 26 years. Sabathia finished sixth in National League MVP voting — higher than any other pitcher — even though he made more starts in the AL (18) than the NL (17) that season.

Even for a player of Ohtani’s unprecedented talents, Sabathia’s epic 2008 performance would be difficult to surpass. At his current pace, Ohtani’s 4.2 combined batting and pitching WAR would edge out the rest of the players on the list — a group that includes memorable recent performances, several historically notable ones, and even a few new Hall of Famers.

Though it’s largely forgotten now because of the ripple effects of who they dealt away in the trade, the Detroit Tigers’ acquisition of starter Doyle Alexander from the Atlanta Braves in 1987 looked pretty good at the time. Alexander went 9-0 with a 1.59 ERA and 4.0 WAR for Detroit, helping boost the Tigers’ playoff odds from 34% on the day of the trade to clinching the AL East.

Unfortunately for Detroit, things went all downhill from there: Alexander took two losses and a 10.00 ERA in the ALCS, which the Tigers lost in five games. And the Braves’ return from the trade — a 20-year-old prospect named John Smoltz — went on to become one of the greatest pitchers in MLB history. Compared to that, the package that Milwaukee sent to Cleveland for Sabathia (which included future All-Star Michael Brantley) doesn’t look too bad.

While solid 13-year MLB vet Jim Hearn’s post-acquisition heroics (3.9 WAR) didn’t power the New York Giants to the postseason in 1950, he did help them get to the World Series in 1951 and 1954. Slightly below him on the list, Randy Johnson’s brief time as a Houston Astro (with whom he went 10-1 with a 1.28 ERA and 3.9 WAR in 1998) deserves recognition for his sheer dominance, even though Houston was already in solid postseason position at the time of the deal — 93% playoff odds — and fell in the NLDS to the Padres despite Johnson posting a 1.93 ERA in the series.

But let’s not lose sight of what a banner year 2008 was for midseason dealings. In addition to Sabathia becoming the GOAT of in-season acquisitions, three other performances from that season show up in our top 20 list: Mark Teixeira, who hit .358 with 13 HRs and a 1.081 OPS in 54 games after joining the Angels; Manny Ramirez, who lit up Tinseltown with a .396 AVG, 17 HRs and a 1.232 OPS in 53 games as an L.A. Dodger; and pitcher Rich Harden, who went 5-1 with a 1.77 ERA upon being dealt to the Chicago Cubs.

Future All-Stars were in the mix of traded players in the deals for Teixeira, Ramirez and Harden, including Jason Bay, Brandon Moss and Josh Donaldson. Most of these deals can form some impressive trade trees if mapped out fully. The tree from the Harden deal was still growing a few seasons ago.

If the Angels trade Ohtani for the type of return he’s worth — a massive haul of prospects and/or players with similar future value — his own trade tree could span a decade or longer. But Ohtani also has the potential to provide a historic amount of value to whichever team he joins for the stretch run. 

And if he does end up actually challenging Sabathia, it would mean putting the finishing touches on an all-time historical season. Adding a Sabathia-esque 5.5 WAR to Ohtani’s current 6.9 mark would give him 12.3 for the entirety of the season, which would be the eighth-most total WAR any player put up in a modern season (going back to 1901). It would also be the most since Steve Carlton had 12.5 in 1972, and the second most since . . . you guessed it, Babe Ruth, who posted 12.7 WAR in 1927.