As a reminder, two-way players have been established in Ottoneu since 2017. The system allows any player to be used in one slot of the lineup for a given day and to accrue stats according to where they are placed in the lineup.
The rules page now states this explicitly for two-way players:
viii. A player who has both positional and pitcher eligibility can be used in one slot per day or per week, in the case of a league with weekly lineups.
A. If that slot if hitting, then only his hitting stats will accrue for that day or week
B. If that stat is pitching, then his pitching stats will accrue for that day or week
This language is adapted directly from the original proposal from 2017.
Excited to see how Ohtani does tonight, and will revisit this rule if and when more two-way players get a chance to predictably both hit and pitch on the same day in MLB.
Same as any other player - he’ll go in the one position where he maximizes your total score. If your team is better off with his pitching, you’ll get that. If it’s better off with his offense, you’ll get that.
so obviously tonight is the first night in 118 years for this occurrence, but if he gets in the lineup for 5 pitching starts? is there a possibility the rule changes? or just too rare since he’s the only player in the entire MLB for this situation, and it only effects him once a week. cheers! just genuinely curious.
Ok @nivshah, I know you said this rule could be revisited if and when there were more two-way players, but then Ohtani went out and had a season like none we’ve seen before. Vegas has him as the odds on favorite for AL MVP and he should win the ottoneu version of the award too. His combined points for pitching and hitting was 1785 in FGPts. A whopping 40% more points than his likely MVP runner-up, Vlad Jr. managed.
But with the current rules, owners could never capture all those points.
I looked at the numbers, and while Ohtani’s Pts/G in games where he also pitched was not as good as his non-pitching days, I think the discussion is still worth having: should there be an ottoneu option to allow owners to also collect the points a pitcher gets while hitting?
From my quick check of FanGraphs, it seems like there were 19 games this year where Ohtani owners had to choose between placing him in their rotation or their lineup. For most pitchers, you would likely not want their few ABs to count in their point totals, but for Ohtani, it was a gamble.
I realize the structure of the game’s code might not allow for this and perhaps the status quo is a natural check for the absurdity that Ohtani is, but I had to bring this up anyways.