Spending a hefty $100 on a single player in fantasy baseball might sound wild, but when it comes to Shohei Ohtani, the question isn't 'Can you afford to bid that much?' but rather 'Can you afford not to?'
If you're aiming to have the phenomenal Shohei Ohtani on your salary-cap fantasy baseball team this season, prepare yourself: it's going to cost you a cool $100, and honestly, it absolutely should.
While the thought of dedicating over 38% of your entire fantasy team's budget to just one player might be hard to swallow, Ohtani is that exceptionally rare talent whose skills justify the significant financial investment. Think of him as a "one-man cheat code," akin to a prime Wayne Gretzky in fantasy hockey – a player who provides a strategic edge that no one else can possibly replicate.
Let's look at Ohtani's incredible track record:
- He's achieved a record four unanimous MVP awards (in 2021, and then consecutively from 2023-2025).
- He made history by being the first player to achieve a 50-home run and 50-stolen base season (in 2024).
- In 2025, he etched his name in the record books again as the first player ever to hit three home runs as a batter while simultaneously striking out 10 hitters as a pitcher in the very same game.
These are just the headline achievements, but Ohtani's fantasy impact is almost equally astounding. When you combine his hitting and pitching prowess, his fantasy point totals over the last five seasons have been a remarkable 781, 886, 831, 653, and 694. To put this into perspective, in the last 16 seasons, the only other players who have even reached 650 fantasy points (which is three fewer than Ohtani's lowest point in 2024) are Ronald Acuña Jr. (707 in 2024), Jake Arrieta (667 in 2015), Gerrit Cole (685 in 2019), Clayton Kershaw (702 in 2015), Max Scherzer (659 in 2018), and Justin Verlander (692 in 2019 and 676 in 2011).
And it gets even better! This season, Ohtani is slated to pitch throughout the entire Los Angeles Dodgers' schedule. This means he has his best opportunity yet to surpass his career-high of 842 fantasy points, set back in 2022. The projection of him being a 50-homer hitter and a 180-strikeout pitcher for 2026 makes him one of the most coveted fantasy picks of all time – not just for this year!
Surely, you have some questions about this extraordinary player.
Yes, it's true that we were in a similar discussion last year, with Ohtani projected to earn around $83 in ESPN's standard points league. Based on his pitching performance in 2025, last season might have seemed like a relative letdown. If you had only used him as a hitter in our game, he would have generated "only" $44.7 in production, though that still ranked as the third-best rate for any individual player.
However, what we couldn't have anticipated then was how cautiously the Dodgers would manage Ohtani's recovery from his September 2023 UCL repair and his November 2024 surgery to fix a torn labrum he sustained during the 2024 World Series. Our projections anticipated 20 starts and 118 innings pitched. In reality, he only made 14 starts and pitched a mere 47 innings during the regular season.
This season, Ohtani is expected to be fully stretched out as a starter by Opening Day, and the Dodgers haven't indicated any strict innings limits for him. While they might still be mindful of his usage, especially after he pitched a total of just 67 1/3 innings across the 2025 regular season and postseason, there's no reason to doubt he can meet our 2026 projections of 26 starts and 144 innings.
How can you truly maximize Ohtani's incredible value?
Even with all this, fantasy managers still face a crucial decision on game days where Ohtani is both pitching and hitting: you can't earn points from both roles simultaneously. As was the case before his 2023 surgery, he is definitively a better starting pitcher than a Designated Hitter for fantasy purposes on those days, and the loss of his hitting production is far from a deal-breaker.
Even in 2025, Ohtani scored more fantasy points as a pitcher than as a hitter in 11 out of his 14 starts, with these instances concentrated in his final 12 outings. During those last dozen starts, he averaged 8.3 more fantasy points as a pitcher than as a hitter. If you had exclusively used him as a pitcher on those days for all 14 starts, he would have scored you an additional 86 points, making him the league's top scorer (656 points) by a commanding 57 points over fantasy's second-ranked player, Aaron Judge. This analysis would have made Ohtani worth $58.1.
Throughout his career, Ohtani has averaged 11.7 more fantasy points as a pitcher than as a hitter on days when you had the choice of how to deploy him. This signifies even greater point-generating potential than we witnessed at his 2025 pitching peak (which, admittedly, occurred during the 2025 playoffs). Keep in mind that he averaged 79.5 pitches over his final 10 regular-season and postseason starts, inching closer to a full-time pitcher's workload.
When we adjust Ohtani's historical fantasy points to reflect him being used as a pitcher on all his pitching days, he would have outscored the next-closest player by 162 points in 2021, 235 points in 2022, and 23 points in 2024 (a season where he didn't pitch). In 2023, while he would have been 22 points behind Acuña's total, he would have still been a substantial 111 points ahead of the third-best option.
Using our 2026 projections and deducting his average hitting points for his 26 forecasted starts, Ohtani is projected to score 819 fantasy points, which is an astounding 242 points more than anyone else in the game – Aaron Judge's projected 577 points rank second. Even if he were to score a mere 50% of his projected pitching points, he would still lead the league by 100 points.
This kind of advantage is precisely why shifting your league to a salary-cap format is so compelling. Teams that secure the No. 1 draft pick gain a significant edge in our standard game, as Ohtani's production is simply unmatched by any other current player. While injuries can certainly be the great equalizer, as we've noted, Ohtani has consistently scored over 653 fantasy points for half a decade, even through multiple surgeries.
If your league operates on a salary-cap system, then despite any discomfort you might feel about allocating such a large portion of your budget to a single player, Ohtani's $100 asking price is statistically justified. Consider every dollar you manage to save below that amount at the draft table as a direct advantage to the winning bidder. In fact, an opening bid of $100, a "freeze bid," might be a very smart strategy for those who truly recognize his unparalleled worth.
But here's where it gets controversial: Is it truly a fair playing field when one player can so drastically skew the entire league's competitive balance? And does this dominance encourage a less strategic, more individualistic approach to fantasy management? What are your thoughts on such a dominant force in fantasy leagues? Let us know in the comments below!
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