Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge postseason slow starts

The Dodgers and Yankees each made it to their respective League Championship Series, and they combined to win three of the first four games of those series, and yet they each had a similar question to answer: Why have our biggest hitting superstars not done a whole lot so far?

We are, of course, talking about Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, almost certainly the soon-to-be-minted MVP Award winners.

Ohtani has hit just .222/.344/.333 in his first seven postseason games, entering Wednesday’s Game 3 of the NLCS in New York. The only real damage he’s done came back in Game 1 of the NLDS against the Padres, when he homered off Dylan Cease in his second plate appearance. “What I do know is that we’ve been playing against good teams, better teams, with their best pitchers. So being able to get base hits, put up results, isn’t as easy as maybe it could be,” he said.

Judge, meanwhile, entered Game 2 of the ALCS with a line of just .133/.364/.200 in five games this October — contributing to a growing pile of underwhelming playoff hitting — and then failed to reach in his first three plate appearances before finally going long with a seventh-inning home run.

It’s hard to say that one single swing is going to turn around his postseason, but it is more than a little notable that the kind of pitch he hit was exactly along the lines of the scouting report that’s been giving him such trouble this month. What’s been causing his struggle — and if we really did just see the start of an October breakout, can we say that Ohtani is coming next?

1. It’s a small sample – and hitters always do worse in the playoffs.

OK, yes: Both true. Ohtani posting an OPS below .700 in a seven-game span of 32 or more plate appearances isn’t exactly unheard of, is it? He’s done it hundreds of times. You just notice it a whole lot more right now than you did, say, between May 31 and June 7, when he hit .172/.250/.276, mostly against the Rockies and Pirates. It’s baseball. These things happen.

In addition, because the postseason means a hitter is only facing the best pitching teams, and only the best pitchers on those teams, with much more aggressive usage, batting lines always go down. This year, that’s a .648 postseason OPS, down from the regular season’s .711. While Giancarlo Stanton and Kiké Hernández are doing their best to disprove that it’s harder to hit in October, it overwhelmingly is.

Those are real, valid reasons — yet maybe also not terribly satisfying ones for two of baseball’s best. What about each of their individual cases?

2. Ohtani: It’s the first pitch.

There’s been this fun stat floating around this postseason that goes like this:

Ohtani is hitless in 19 plate appearances with the bases empty, and is 6-for-8 with three walks when there are runners on base.

It’s notable because it’s so wild and interesting, and also because it’s probably not all that predictive or meaningful, given that we’re now slicing tiny samples into even tinier samples. There’s also the fact that, for a variety of reasons, hitters are generally better with runners on base. Not to this extent, of course, but +53 points of OPS across the Majors this year isn’t nothing, right?

But here’s the more interesting version of that stat, and it’ll help us get to what’s really going on.

Again, you generally expect performance with runners on to be a little worse, because the pitcher has more to worry about, and because that’s likely a pitcher who just failed to retire a hitter anyway — but not to this extent.

So why do we say watch for the first pitch? Because while the outcomes he’s having with runners on or not may be a little fluky, the processes that go into them are clearly noticeable, which we can clearly sum up in two pictures.

With runners on base, pitchers have been far more cautious about giving Ohtani anything to hit on the first pitch, and he’s smartly dropped his first-pitch swing rate in kind. Not chasing on the first pitch helps put him in better hitter’s counts, which in turn help lead to better outcomes later in the at-bat.

The shape there is the same, is the point. With runners on, he’s getting a lot fewer first pitches in the zone (27%, down from September’s 56%), and he’s swinging less in reply (36%, down from September’s 51%). Everything is as it should be.

But when the bases are empty? The picture is far different. He’s not really seeing any more or fewer strikes on 0-0 than he was in the regular season. He’s just swinging much, much more often.

That first-pitch swing rate has jumped from 44% to 67% with the bases empty, even though the rate of pitches in the zone hasn’t changed much at all. Put it this way: In August, he went after exactly four first pitches with the bases empty outside the zone all month long. In October, he’s done it five times already.

Is that simply pressing, of feeling the pressure in your long-awaited first postseason? We won’t pretend to get inside his head in that way — though the World Baseball Classic was pretty pressure-packed, too, and it didn’t stop him from being named the MVP of the tournament.

It might be that. It might also be that when he struck out seven of 10 times against two Padres pitchers who clearly have his number — Tanner Scott and Yu Darvish — that the bases were empty eight times, too. The bases were empty all three times he faced Sean Manaea in NLCS Game 2, as well, and he struck out twice there.

It’s a little chicken-and-the-egg; it could be that Scott, Darvish and Manaea would have done the same against Ohtani had the bases been full of runners. But the next time you see Ohtani come to the plate with no one on base against the Mets, you know what to look for on the first pitch. If he’s swinging at anything and everything, it’s going to be a problem.

3. Judge: Watch the eye level.

It’s a little different here, given that this is Ohtani’s first postseason experience, while Judge has been in 50 games going back to 2017. It’s easy to forget, now, given his recent struggles, that he does have 14 postseason home runs, slowly climbing up the all-time list. If the postseason hasn’t exactly increased his star power, it’s also not like he’s never, ever had success there, either.

In his case, it’s not about strikeouts at all, as his 27% rate entering Game 2 is barely different from his 28% career strikeout rate. Nor is it about hitting the ball hard. His 60% hard-hit rate in October is excellent, and squarely in line with his regular season marks. It’s also not about bat speed, which is as fast as ever this month.

If you want to say “there’s some bad luck” here, that’s probably true. His batting average is running more than 50 points behind his expected stats, based on the quality of his contact — dig this 114 mph lineout snagged by Bobby Witt Jr., for one — but even the expected stats aren’t that great, and you can avoid any issues with luck or defenders by putting home runs into the seats, which he’s clearly not doing.

He is, however, being pitched quite differently. Let’s talk about eye levels, the changing of which pitchers have been talking about since the beginning of the sport. This October is the 50th different month of his career, postseason included, that he’s seen at least 10 four-seamers and 10 breaking balls. When you look at the height they’re being delivered to, you’ll find something fascinating.

There’s an extra half-foot, vertically, and it might be what’s causing this:

But we promised before there was going to be something meaningful about Tuesday’s home run, and it’s this: It was the second-highest pitch he’s ever hit for a home run, regular season and post, all 329 of them in his career. Perhaps more importantly, it was the highest fastball he’s ever hit for a home run — ever. It’s not that Hunter Gaddis didn’t know the scouting report. It’s not that he didn’t hit his spot. It’s that Judge finally managed to get enough bat on it to get it out that high, even if to center.

If these sound like relatively minor reasons, they are. Ohtani’s issues appear to be about approach. Judge’s issues appear to be about inches. It doesn’t seem like either issue is one that can’t be solved in a single night. Judge, perhaps, already has solved his issue. Can Ohtani be next?