There Will Be Two Shohei Ohtanis In Yahoo Fantasy Baseball This Year: A Batter And A Pitcher

Baseball America- After a month of near-daily meetings with content managers and software engineers, Yahoo! has reached a decision on how it will handle the arrival of Shohei Ohtani. There will be two of him. If you’re in a Yahoo! league and you want to accrue Ohtani’s hitting and pitching stats, you’re going to have to draft him twice, once as a pitcher and then again as a hitter. There were a number of potential solutions that Yahoo! discussed but ultimately, Yahoo! content manager Guy Lake said, this decision combined the best of both worlds when it came to functionality and playability. “We knew this was coming,” Lake said, “so we had to come to a position about it.” The new rule will also cover any further two-way players, like Rays prospect Brendan McKay, who make it to the major leagues.

Before deciding on the two-Ohtani solution, Yahoo! batted around a number of ideas about how to handle the sport’s most intriguing star in the past several decades. One solution involved giving Ohtani eligibility as both a hitter and a pitcher, with the ability to toggle back and forth. The catch there was that Ohtani would never be able to accumulate stats on both sides of the ball simultaneously. If a user had Ohtani slotted in as a pitcher that day and he hit two home runs, it wouldn’t matter. The only stats relevant that day for that user would be whatever Ohtani did on the mound. That particular option was popular among the gathered decision-makers. “There were a handful of exceptions in a room full of 20 people talking about this who were against this from a user-experience standpoint,” Lake said, “but I would say 15 or 16 people in the room were in favor of it, as was I. Why? Because it’s freaking cool. It’s cool to be able to take your starting pitcher one day, and then—maybe not the next day, but the following day—you can slot him into your utility spot, or maybe outfield. That’s just an exceptionally cool thing.”

Another option, which gained little traction, was to simply leave him as a pitcher or a hitter and discount his other stats entirely. This answer, of course, sucks all of the intrigue out of Ohtani and neutralizes what could wind up being a significant amount of his value from a fantasy and real-life standpoint. That would have made the lives of Yahoo!’s engineers much easier, but it would have been a decidedly uninspired way to handle things. “You simply pick a position, assign it to him and then take the stats that he accumulates at that position and you’re done,” Lake said. “But we thought that would be a huge cop-out for our users and a cop-out for us as players. That was immediately thrown out. It wasn’t an option.”

Then there was the choice they arrived at: The two-Ohtani solution, which has also been discussed by ESPN as its answer to the Ohtani quandary. And even though it’s the solution Yahoo! settled upon, they also realize that it’s not by any means perfect. It does offer a relatively easy solution for the company’s engineers—they simply clone Ohtani’s player ID and then change his position. It also helps Ohtani owners avoid the decision of how to deploy him on a daily basis. If they use him as a starting pitcher and he gets bombed but hits a pair of home runs in the same game, then those owners are going to feel rightly disappointed that they only got his pitching stats for that day. “That’s the best gloss I can put on it,” Lake said. “I would love it if we could say ‘No problem’ (and encompass all of Ohtani’s value into one draftable player). If it were easy, there would be one. Let’s be clear about that: It’s not easy, but we’ve come up with what we think is the best from a set of imperfect choices.”

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Nothing better than a little bit of chaos for fantasy websites! Usually that comes in the form of outages during the first day of the season, but Hubbs’ favorite player Shohei Otani was the fly in the ointment for fantasy developers, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass this time around. Every league has the guy that complains that pitchers stats don’t count when his player goes yard (usually the Madison Bumgarner owner). But that asshole doesn’t say boo when MadBum is 0 for his last 15. Which is why this was such a problem. Having all pitchers stats at the plate count would make people draft AL pitchers in mixed leagues. Yeah you may get a bomb or a RBI here and there, but for the most part NL pitchers would do to your hitting stats what J Hammy *allegedly* did to Portnoy’s bank account.

Now you may be asking yourself “Hey Clem, you are usually a pretty nice guy. Why do you enjoy this type of chaos?”. Well friend, for one it’s always funny watching fantasy people lose their mind when they don’t get credit for stats they think they deserve like that Bumgarner guy I was talking about earlier. After playing fantasy sports for more than two decades, I realize that it’s more about making your friends’ lives miserable as it is about feeling happy you won. Two Ohtanis means that every time he plays, an owner will feel like he is missing out on stats. Unless that owner has two Ohtani, in which case he has two of the same person. As Bill Parcells used to say, if you have two Shohei Ohtanis, you really have none. Having to make sure you have the right Ohtani in could break my brain. Same with trading Shohei Ohtani (P) for Shohei Ohtani (OF), which is basically trade masturbation. And can you imagine if a fantasy championship is decided because Ohtani the pitcher throws a shutout but goes 0-4 at the dish? I am all for more wacky scenarios being possible in fantasy sports. People may say they don’t care about other peoples’ fantasy teams, but I always enjoy hearing a good fantasy dick punch story.

Next is that there could be different rules on different sites. Yahoo may have two Ohtanis but ESPN could have one Super Ohtani that hit dingers and pitches gems (unless his elbow is completely fucked). Having to clarify what type of Ohtani fantasy league you are in before talking about a draft/trade/lineup decision with a friend like it’s a PPR or non-PPR makes me laugh. And the thought of fantasy departments around the globe having countless meetings about this Ohtani’s position cracks me up. I would just have asked Fantasy Labs what they think Ohtani’s position should be since they are my one stop shop for all my fantasy position needs.

But the most important part of this is that I used to be a customer service rep for the fantasy department of Sporting News from 2006-2007. During that time, a player named Marques Colston entered the NFL as a quiet 7th round pick from Hofstra on a Saints team that went 3-13 the year before. For some reason, Colston was listed as a tight end in our (as well as many other fantasy sites) game. A few diehards alerted us of this error, but not much mind was paid to it. Colston’s position was his position. What followed was a 1,000 yard, 8 touchdown rookie campaign on a Saints team with a dynamic offense that went 10-6. I had to deal with roughly a billion emails asking why Marques Colston was listed as a tight end when he was clearly a receiver. I can’t even lie, I even drafted Colston in my fantasy league because of all these mamalukes angrily writing in about him. I nicknamed him The Glitch and it was one of the most magical seasons I’ve ever had as a fantasy owner. But at work, it was a nightmare. Now I am a smut blogger and very far away from all this type of nonsense. Which is why I like seeing this chaos happen from a distance. Some men just want to watch the world burn, I guess. But as someone that was buried under ashes for the 2006 NFL season, can you really blame me?