December 12, 2023

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

Tough sport, baseball. Tough business, too.

Here you have a guy who homered 44 times in 2023, won his second MVP award and won the pocket-protector Triple Crown (slugging percentage, on-base percentage and OPS).

He made $30 million for all that. Next year he makes $2 million.

What did Shohei Ohtani do? What microaggressions did he transmit? Did he drive up to a Chick-Fil-A on a Sunday? Did he get caught test-driving an electric car?

No, Ohtani did something that nobody ever considered. That’s kind of his thing, you know. He was a free agent and listened politely to the Cubs, Blue Jays and Giants, but he spent more hours talking to the Dodgers, who had spent many more hours, and innumerable units of psychic capital, thinking about him. The Dodgers boldly pared down their roster, and basically donated a serpentine belt named Corey Seager to power the Texas Rangers’ 2023 world championship, because they had seen for years that they needed Ohtani, the man who gets Cy Young and MVP votes alike. Last weekend they got him. On Monday we discovered how.

Ohtani essentially signed a $20 million, 10-year contract to play baseball for the Dodgers through the 2033 season, at which point Dodger Stadium will be 71 years old and the Maple Leafs will be insisting that this is the year.

He will be making a lot more than that, of course, but not from the Dodgers. As the endorsement and merchandise money rolls into his coffers, the ballclub will be free, or freer, to give him the teammates he craves. They will be able to re-sign Walker Buehler and Will Smith, if that’s what Buehler and Smith want, and they will continue to do free agent business and keep their unparalleled development train rolling. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird used to settle for less than the maximum if they meant accommodating the NBA salary cap, and NFL players have often restructured their deals or had them restructured for them. But nobody does it anymore, and nobody ever has done it like Ohtani and the Dodgers will do it. It was the slickest of gambits, and one that anyone else in baseball, even the Angels, could have pulled off, limited only by their imaginations.

As you know, it’s a little more complicated than all that. Ohtani still signed the richest contract in the history of American professional sports, nominally for $700 million. The figure will be adjusted downward to recognize inflation. The Dodgers will still have to account for this in the context of Major League Baseball’s luxury tax thresholds, but Ohtani’s deal will “only” account for $46 million in Average Annual Value. They can live with that.

As for paying off their deferred obligations, who knows who will be owning the Dodgers in the roaring 30’s? This is the heaviest can anyone’s ever kicked down the road, outside of Congress at least.

Sixteen Dodgers will draw more actual salary than Ohtani will in 2024, and the roster isn’t even close to final. At the moment he ranks between Dustin May ($2.25 million) and Yency Almonte ($1.9 million). Of course he won’t be pitching in 2024, and even though the doctors proclaim that he’ll be fine the year after that, no one really knows, just as no one really knows about any pitcher. An Ohtani who doesn’t pitch is basically a glorified Hideki Matsui. His whole marketability depends on his Neil Armstrong qualities, going where no man ever has. As a hitter he’ll enhance Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, already one of the best 1-2 combos to ever grace a lineup card. Still, the Dodgers hit 249 home runs and scored 907 runs and won 100 games in 2023 without him.

Their immediate success will depend on the creation of a pitching rotation that, during their dismal playoff loss to Arizona, was led by an unprepared Bobby Miller. For one of the few times in the Guggenheim version of the Dodgers, the answers are not inside the family.

Just think of how little confidence Ohtani must have had in Angel management and owner Artie Moreno. He kept demanding, quietly, that they improve themselves, but he never offered this kind of charity. Thanks to injury, and peculiarly long rehabilitation, Ohtani never really got to partner with Mike Trout and Anthony “Aflac” Rendon, who will make more than $75 million each year through 2026. Last season Trout and Rendon combined for 66 RBI in 545 plate appearances, and the Angels went 73-89.

The marketing wing of the MLB operation must be happy with all this, especially when its most famous player turns out to be the least avaricious. One imagines commissioner Rob Manfred is not quite as happy about this fly sweep that Ohtani and the Dodgers have run around the luxury tax. But that will be resolved later, and the Dodgers will head for 162 games of marching in place before their real fate is revealed.

The last 11 Dodger teams have all made the playoffs, and now those millions of spoiled fans get baseball’s version of Da Vinci, who was a painter, sculptor, inventor, architect, engineer and was even known for his ability to replace a fitted sheet. Ohtani is a six-tool player, too. But, ideally, he will motivate hitters who don’t want to give up pitching, and pitchers who don’t want to give up hitting, to insist on playing in both halves of that inning. There’s evidence there might be some money in doing such things, at some point.