Shohei Ohtani Flashes Hype-Worthy Ace Potential After Nightmare Beginning

Shohei Ohtani finally got a proper introduction to a major league mound on Sunday, and he used it to look a lot more like the Japanese legend than the spring training cautionary tale.

Granted, the 23-year-old wannabe two-way star (he went 1-for-5 in his hitting debut on Thursday) didn't compile an all-timer of a pitching line in the Los Angeles Angels' 7-4 win over the Oakland Athletics. He lasted six innings and gave up three runs, all of which scored on a long home run by Matt Chapman.

But like with any good race car, it's what's under the hood that counts.

Elsewhere on Ohtani's debut line are six strikeouts and one walk. He earned those by throwing 63 strikes and by collecting (per ESPN.com) 18 whiffs out of 92 total pitches.

That's a 68 percent rate of strikes and a 20 percent rate of swinging strikes. Even Max Scherzer would blush at strike and whiff rates like those.

Yeah, yeah. Small sample size and everything. One promising start does not an ace make. And so on with the appropriate disclaimers.

But if nothing else, this much is apparent right now: The Ohtani who looked completely out of his depth during spring training wasn't the real Ohtani.

Although he arguably looked worse at the plate in putting up a .347 OPS in 11 Cactus League games, Ohtani didn't look good on the mound. He put up a 27.00 ERA in two Cactus League starts and also mostly got knocked around in three unofficial outings.

Included among the latter set was an exhibition against the Mexican League's Tijuana Toros in which he got shelled for six runs. According to Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports, part of the problem was that Ohtani's fastball velocity was having difficulty escaping the 90-to-91 mph range.

In retrospect, maybe that's because he was saving his best bullets for The Show.

His fastball peaked at 99.6 mph and averaged 97.8 mph on Sunday, according to Baseball Savant. The latter figure is comparable to the 2017 lead in average four-seamer velocity, which was shared by Luis Severino and Luis Castillo at 97.5 mph.

While Ohtani's fastball set 'em up, his split-finger fastball knocked 'em down. Nobody felt the pain quite like Matt Olson, who saw one splitter in particular that looked like a pitch from another planet:

That was one of 10 whiffs that Ohtani got out of 24 total splitters. That's a 42 percent whiff rate, which is basically double the top whiff rates of the biggest splitter merchants (Hector Neris, Masahiro Tanaka and Kevin Gausman) of 2017.

If there's a nit to pick with the electric fastball/splitter combination that Ohtani debuted with, it's that his fastball command wasn't especially precise. And while we're picking nits, we should also point out that his slider appears to be a work in progress.

He featured the pitch often against the A's, throwing it a total of 26 times. But quite a few of his sliders either missed up or simply didn't break. It was also a slider that Chapman hit out of the yard.

However, Ohtani was locating his sliders better in his last four innings than he was in his first two. And even the one that ended up in the seats wasn't an egregious error. Chapman had to reach for it, which is typically the mark of a good slider:

Screenshot courtesy of Fox Sports West, via MLB.tv.

As it turned out, Chapman's homer was the last hit that Ohtani would allow. He faced 15 batters the rest of the way and retired all but one of them—Matt Joyce walked with one out in the fourth inning.

So nitpicks aside, this was pretty much the Ohtani that was promised.

This is, after all, the same guy who put up a 2.52 ERA and struck out 29 percent of the batters he faced in five seasons of Nippon Professional Baseball before coming to the States. He did that by pushing his fastball as high as 102 mph and by impressing even major league veterans with his splitter and other secondary offerings.

As former Seattle Mariners outfielder Stefen Romero told Kyle Glaser of Baseball America:

"His forkball [splitter], it looks just like a fastball but it drops two feet straight down. It starts at your thigh and looks just like a 100 mph fastball and then it just drops two feet into the dirt. His off-speed stuff is pretty legit.”

Ohtani's powerful bat was hard to ignore in its own right and was surely a factor in teams' pulling out all the stops to try to sign him over the offseason. But his arm was the main attraction then, not to mention the primary reason he ultimately ranked as MLB.com's No. 1 prospect for 2018.

"The scouting reports on Ohtani as a pitcher almost seem too good to be true," the site stated.

This was only evident in small flashes during spring training. When Ohtani wasn't disappointing with his velocity, he was often struggling to find a consistent release point and generally looking more like Nuke LaLoosh than a can't-miss wunderkind. It was enough to raise the specter of a detour to the minors.

So much for that. Although Ohtani does have kinks to iron out before he can be deemed a finished product, his major league debut proved that he has as much ace upside as any young pitcher in baseball.

In so many words: The hype is back on.

Spring stats courtesy of MLB.com. Other stats courtesy of Baseball Reference and Baseball Savant.