If you want Shohei Ohtani on your salary-cap team this fantasy baseball season, it will — and it should — cost you $100.
Difficult as it might be to fathom spending $100 (more than 38% of your fantasy team’s entire budget) on a singular player, Ohtani is that rare individual whose talents warrant the financial output. He’s a one-man cheat code, a «Wayne Gretzky in his prime» in fantasy hockey kind of player. Ohtani grants his fantasy managers a strategic advantage that no other player can replicate.
Consider Ohtani’s résumé:
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He has won a record four unanimous MVP awards (2021, ’23-25).
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He authored baseball’s first-ever 50/50 season (2024).
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He became the first player in history to hit three home runs as a batter while also striking out 10 hitters as a pitcher in the same game (2025).
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Those are merely the highlights, as Ohtani’s fantasy accomplishments are nearly as extraordinary. Combining his hitting and pitching exploits, he has scored 781, 886, 831, 653 and 694 fantasy points over the last five seasons. To put those into perspective, the only other players to score as many as 650 fantasy points — a total three fewer than Ohtani’s «low point» in 2024 — in any of the last 16 seasons were Ronald Acuna 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).
It gets better, as this season, Ohtani will be available to pitch over the entirety of his Los Angeles Dodgers’ schedule, meaning he has never had a greater chance to equal that career high of 842 points, set back in 2022. The fact that Ohtani could be a 50-homer hitter and a 180-strikeout pitcher (as his projection states) makes him one of the most attractive fantasy picks ever — not only for 2026.
Surely, you have questions
Yes, it’s true that we were in this very place a year ago, with Ohtani projected for $83 in ESPN standard points-league earnings. Therefore, judging by his pitching returns in 2025, last season would be perceived as a relative disappointment. Had you used Ohtani exclusively as a hitter in our game, he’d have earned you «only» $44.7 in production, though that’s still the third-best rate of any individual player.
What we couldn’t have foreseen at the time, however, was exactly how conservative the Dodgers would be with Ohtani’s recovery from both a September 2023 UCL repair and November 2024 surgery to repair the torn labrum he suffered during the 2024 World Series. We projected 20 starts and 118 innings pitched. As it turns out, he would make only 14 starts and pitch just 47 innings during the regular season.
This season, Ohtani will be fully stretched out as a starter by Opening Day, and the Dodgers have given no indication of any firm innings limit on the right-hander. That’s not to say they won’t be conservative with his usage, but after Ohtani totaled a mere 67 1/3 frames between the regular season and postseason in 2025, there’s no reason to believe he can’t meet our 2026 projections of 26 starts and 144 innings.
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All that said, fantasy managers are still faced with a choice on how to deploy Ohtani on his combination pitching/designated hitter days, as you can’t reap the benefits of his points on both sides. As was the case before his 2023 surgery, he’s a definitively better starting pitcher than DH for fantasy purposes on those days, and the loss of hitting production is far from devastating.
Even in 2025, Ohtani scored more fantasy points as a pitcher than he did as a hitter in 11 of his 14 starts, all of those coming across his final 12 outings. In those final dozen turns, he averaged 8.3 more fantasy points as a pitcher than he did as a hitter and, if you had used him as a pitcher only on those days for all 14 of his starts, he’d have scored you 86 additional points and been the league’s top-scoring player (656) by 57 points ahead of fantasy No. 2 Aaron Judge, making Ohtani worth $58.1 in the aforementioned analysis.
For his career, Ohtani has averaged 11.7 more fantasy points as a pitcher than he has as a hitter on days where you’ve had the choice in how to deploy him, meaning there’s even more point-generating potential from him than we saw at his 2025 pitching peak (which, granted, came during the 2025 playoffs). Be aware that he averaged 79.5 pitches over his final 10 regular-season and postseason starts, as he edged ever closer to a full-timer’s usage level.
Adjusting Ohtani’s historical fantasy points to account for using him as a pitcher on all of his pitching days, he’d have scored 162 (2021), 235 (2022) and 23 (2024, a season during which he didn’t pitch) more points than the next-closest player. In 2023, while he would have trailed Acuna’s total by 22 points, he’d still have been 111 ahead of the third-best option.
Using our 2026 numbers, and docking him his per-game hitting average for his 26 forecasted starts, Ohtani projects for 819 fantasy points, or 242 more than anyone else in the game — Judge’s 577 points rank second. He could score a mere 50% of the pitching points we project for him, and he’d still lap the league by 100 points.
It’s an advantage Ohtani provides that, in fact, strengthens the case for shifting your league to the salary-cap format. Teams that draw the No. 1 draft position gain a significant advantage in our standard game, as his production cannot be matched by any other current player. Yes, injuries can be the great equalizer, but as noted above, Ohtani hasn’t finished below 653 fantasy points in a half-decade, despite having required multiple surgeries during that time.
If your league is indeed a salary-cap game, as uncomfortable as you might be to sink that sizable a chunk of your budget into a single player, Ohtani’s $100 asking price is statistically warranted. Consider every dollar saved beneath that at the draft table as an advantage to the winning bidder. In fact, a $100 opening, «freeze bid» might be a wise strategy for those who appreciate his true worth.
