Quote:
Originally Posted by zworykin
That may be an argument someone has made, but it certainly wasn't me. I've got him in front of Judge, but I absolutely never said it was by a wide margin (much less a runaway margin).
The entire concept of "using WAR to judge the 'value' of a player" just falls apart, for me, when you're looking at a true two-way player. In the real world, you know for an absolute fact that you can't replace Ohtani with another two-way player. There just IS no "replacement player" to validly compare him against. Calculating his WAR as if he was a position player and his WAR as if he was a pitcher and just adding the two numbers together is, to me, just way too simplistic.
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I think what you are suggesting is:
1) you couldn’t replace Ohtani and get the same result
2) you could replace Judge and get the same result
I’m not sure either of those is true. Part of Ohtani’s weakness in the current rules of the game is he is fully replaceable. While he is a highly unusual combination of skills, that is extraordinary from a difficulty standpoint… he also doesn’t create more value than another top 10 pitcher + good DH combo. For instance would you rather have Ohtani, or Verlander + Yordan? This is the real problem Ohtani faces… he is a good option for P+DH, but not as valuable as what you can get out of two players on other teams.
On the other hand, could you replace Judge with two players? Or JoRam? I’m not sure we can create a Frankenstein platoon that would beat their performance.
Thus from a true MVP standpoint Judge or JoRam are more irreplaceable than Ohtani. Even if Ohtani is rarer to deliver his result.
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