Let’s be more direct: Ohtani just had the greatest individual game in postseason history. On the mound, he threw six scoreless innings, allowing two hits and three walks while striking out 10. He got pulled after giving up two straight baserunners to start the seventh, which kind of mucked up his line, which is ironic, because that’s what the Dodgers offense has been doing to other starting pitchers over the past two weeks.
At the plate: 3-for-3 with a walk. All of those hits were solo home runs: 116.5 mph off the bat and 446 feet in the first, 116.9 mph and 469 feet in the fourth, 113.6 mph and 427 feet to center in the seventh. That second one, man, what a tank.
This is the perfect distillation of the value proposition for Ohtani. Given that this win, 5-1 over the Brewers in NLCS Game 4, clinched the pennant for the Dodgers, either one of those performances would’ve been memorable-bordering-on-legendary for Dodger fans. Put together? Well, after that fourth-inning home run, I started asking that question from a couple paragraphs back: Was this the best game in playoff history? … Read More
It felt groundbreaking when Shohei Ohtani did it with the Los Angeles Dodgers over a year ago. By the time Frank Vatrano did it with the Anaheim Ducks earlier this month, it was a certified California trend.
Athletes, like everyone else, don’t like paying taxes. California has a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, plus there’s the top federal rate of 37 percent, so high-earners like athletes are forking over a lot of hard-earned money. But if the team a player wants to sign with is in California, what can they do to avoid the state’s high taxes? As Ohtani and Vatrano have now done, they can defer the income until they likely won’t be living in the Golden State anymore. … The key to avoiding taxes on deferred payments is paying them out in equal amounts over at least a decade. “A 1996 federal law forbids states from taxing retirement income on out-of-state residents when payments are made in ‘substantially equal periodic’ amounts over at least 10 years,” The Athletic‘s Evan Drellich explained.
Those deferred payments won’t just help athletes avoid taxes—they might help ease the pain felt by franchises in high-tax states when they’re negotiating with players in free agency.
Plenty of factors go into a free agent athlete’s decision on where to sign: taxes, cost of living, and climate, not to mention team-related factors. But research has shown state income taxes really do hold back teams in high-tax states. … Read More
This column returns on a Thursday evening with two notes as lovely as forgetting your problems and drinking sangria in the park.
Scott Harris and the Young Tigers are Going Streaking:
The Detroit Tigers are off today, and, based on their recent performance, only the MLB schedule-maker can stop them from winning. On August 10, Detroit was 55-63, and, according to FanGraphs, their odds of earning a playoff berth stood at 0.5%. Since then, they’ve been the best team in baseball, going 25-10 to push their record to 80-73. They just completed a series sweep of the Kansas City Royals and, amazingly, now sit just a half game out of the American League’s last wild card spot. Those playoff odds accordingly have skyrocketed to 42.3%.
Without a game, I spent the evening listening to an interview (video below) with second-year GM Scott Harris. It’s from June 25, when the team was 36-41. It of course is exciting to hear about all of the front office’s plans and aspirations when, almost three months later, they seemingly are coming to their near-term fruition. It is pretty illuminating to hear Harris speak with confidence about those plans at a time when, at least from the outside, things were not looking too hopeful, though. I also enjoyed this interview because hosts Dan Dickerson and Jason Benetti were able to draw Harris, a self-described introvert, out into the public light in a way in which he has not previously shown himself. The public hasn’t seen or heard very much from Harris since he arrived in Detroit, and what I had observed prior to today wasn’t particularly compelling or illuminating. This, by contrast, was both insightful and enjoyable.
The MLB playoff hunt officially is on in Detroit. The team has nine games left to play, three each against the Orioles, Rays, and White Sox.
Shohei Ohtani, and only Shohei Ohtani:
Today certainly was not an off day for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not only did the team, in routing the Miami Marlins 20-4, clinch a playoff berth for the twelfth consecutive season, but Shohei Ohtani may have had the best single day a major-league hitter ever has had on the diamond. He went six-for-six– including three home runs and two doubles– and stole two bases.
In the process, Ohtani also became the first MLB player ever to hit fifty home runs and steal fifty bases in one season and actually stands at 51/51 with nine games remaining. We knew and hoped Ohtani would be special, but this is uncharted territory.
The year 2018 was a year. Here are some of our favorite things from the year that was 2018.
Atlanta United winning the MLS Cup, at home, in their second year of existence.
America’s women’s hockey team beating Canada to win gold at the winter Olympics.
Phish summer tour. My first time seeing them three nights in a row. That they never repeated a song during that stretch was notable but not terribly surprising. What was remarkable and never received the treatment at this site that it deserved was the overall quality of the performances, especially on Friday, August 3 but really consistently throughout the weekend, where a wide array of songs from across their thirty-five-year catalogue provided launching pads for fresh, collaborative jams time after time. It feels like the band has reached a new level.
Steve McNair: Fall of a Titan. This, from Sports Illustrated, was my first foray into the true-crime podcast genre. The gist: what we were told was an open-and-shut case probably has a lot more to it than what the investigating police department allowed to meet the public eye. Story had some additional resonance for me because I had been living in Nashville at the time.
Maryland-Baltimore County beating Virginia to become the first-ever sixteen seed to beat a one seed in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
The Vegas Golden Knights reaching the Stanley Cup Final in their first year of existence.
Vanderbilt beat Tennessee in football again. The Commodores have won five of the last seven games in this series. (If you’d lost track of him, Derek Dooley’s currently working as the quarterbacks coach at Missouri.)
Baseball Prospectus revised its flagship bating metric and now concedes that Miguel Cabrera, not Mike Trout, deserved the 2012 and 2013 AL MVP awards.
Tiger Woodswinning the PGA Tour Championship at East Lake.
Easily the most anticipated debut of the 2018 MLB season belongs to Shohei Ohtani, the two-way player from Japan who signed with the Angels as an international free agent this offseason. The twenty-three-year-old previously starred as both a starting pitcher and hitter for the Nippon Ham Fighters, a team in Japan’s top professional baseball league. During his five seasons with the Fighters, Ohtani posted a 2.52 ERA and .859 OPS. While his numbers don’t correlate directly to Ohtani’s expected performance with Los Angeles, they do suggest Ohtani could become both a very good pitcher and hitter here, something without recent parallel in the MLB ranks.
The presently ongoing spring training offers American audiences their first good look at Ohtani, who has made one appearance (1.1 IP) on the mound thus far. Can he pitch? Reader, he can pitch:
The Angels surprised many by racing to a second-place finish behind runaway success (and eventual World-Series champion) Houston in 2017, and they promise to be even more interesting in 2018, with a roster that adds Ohtani and a bunch of former Detroit Tigers (Cameron Maybin, Justin Upton, and Ian Kinsler, plus Brad Ausmus as a front-office assistant) to a group that already included Mike Trout, Andrelton Simmons, Zack Cozart, and compiler Albert Pujols.
ALDLAND 