shutime

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all reading this post! Things on this site have been extremely slow with the busyness of the Holidays lately. Shutime will see a lot of changes in 2024, with a huge emphasis on posts here. I’m planning to have at least one post on here each week, but naively hoping for even more than that! As always, thank you for reading. 

Baseball has certainly not been slow as of late. Dominican authorities are on a manhunt for Wander Franco, Andrelton Simmons retired, Juan Soto became a Yankee, and my Rockies won’t see the postseason until my children have their own baseball blog.

But the biggest news of America’s pastime this winter had everything to do with two Japanese men. 

Unless you live under a rock or only get your baseball news from me, you probably heard about the two largest contracts in MLB history (One being the largest overall and the other the largest amongst starting pitchers). Both were signed this month, and both were offered up by the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

The smaller of these two contracts is worth $300 million and was signed by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a Japanese pitcher who hasn’t technically ever played an MLB game. Although, he did tear apart the best major leaguers on the way to a gold medal with japan in the World Baseball Classic in February. He was highly influenced by Shohei Ohtani who signed with the Dodgers just before he did.

Shohei was obviously the much bigger deal. His contract broke records. His choice to defer the money till after his 10 playing years ended wowed baseball fans. Joining a Dodgers team that won their division and 100 games made America sick. But the shock of all of that pales in comparison to the way it unfolded.

A cryptic tweet was posted on Thursday, December 7th that hinted at Ohtani signing his new contract sometime soon after it was posted. Nobody knew what to think of this, as Ohtani’s free agency was quite possibly the most secretive in sports superstar history. Hell, we knew every team LeBron met with on his 2011 free agency tour as it was happening. 

Throughout November, rumors of teams being in or out on signing Ohtani would hit twitter from reputable baseball writers. Hours later, other reputable baseball writers would report that the other writer’s report was completely false. This repeated constantly and really did a number on just about everyone’s reputations. 

With the news of Ohtani’s signing with an unknown team looming in the air, baseball fans and writers dug for anything they could find that would point to what was going to happen. One acclaimed writer tweeted that Ohtani had made his decision, and told the world his dog shared a name with the team’s mascot. The world went into a frenzy trying to find his dog’s name. While this was fun, everybody knew that the Ohtani sweepstakes was down to just a handful of teams; the Dodgers, Cubs, Giants, Blue Jays, and Angels. 

News broke that Japanese Toronto Blue Jays player Yusei Kikuchi had reserved over 50 seats for a large dinner in Toronto the next night. Then another writer researched all private jets flying out of John Wayne Airport on December 8th. Sure enough, someone had a flight booked from Anaheim to Toronto. Then the world went nuts. 

Over 50,000 people tracked the flight from Anaheim to Toronto throughout that Friday morning. The flight was landing around 3 o’clock, the perfect timing for Ohtani to meet his fellow countryman and others as the guest of honor at his own signing party. Toronto was about to party, media members waited at the airport to welcome Ohtani to his new city. A Toronto based beer company offered Ohtani unlimited free beer for life for signing with the team. A baseball writer named Jon Morosi tweeted that Ohtani was confirmed as the person on the jet, and that there was a public signing event at 6pm eastern about to happen. One of the Dodgers largest fan accounts posted an article that Ohtani had signed with the Blue Jays. 

Then that jet landed in Toronto. 

The man who stepped off of the jet was Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec. Ohtani was at home in Los Angeles the entire time. He posted a low-quality google image of the Dodgers Logo the next day to announce his signing.

I’ll start with this, Ohtani choosing the Dodgers definitely made the most sense for him. While the Giants would have been willing to match the Dodger’s ridiculous offer, I would choose LA over living in San Francisco too. Many people don’t know about his impact on Japanese media as well. Had Ohtani moved from LA, an enormous amount of Japanese media members would have to follow him to keep their jobs. For those reasons I respect the decision.

The issue isn’t him signing with the team that will give him the most money and the best chance of winning. The issue is that the team is the Dodgers. A baseball franchise notorious for attempting to buy the World Series time and time again (And failing time and time again). 

Hearing news that Ohtani will be a Dodger was a bummer, but it made sense and everyone saw it coming (Apart from the whole jet situation). 

Any true baseball fan who doesn’t support the Dodgers or Yankees will feel the same way. Teams have long tried to buy the World Series whether successful or not. But none of them have done what the Dodgers are doing now. Over $1 Billion of guaranteed money to two men alone, not to mention the whopping contracts of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Tyler Glasnow (who they also purchased this offseason). 

I’ve seen people constantly comment: “any team can do this”, “you wouldn’t be upset if it was your team”, and “if your owner wanted to spend the money it could be you”. There is a tiny tinge of truth to these claims, but in the vast majority of situations this isn’t true. I would go as far to say these are things people who don’t watch baseball say. Rockies owner Dick Monfort’s net worth is $700 million. He literally could not have signed Ohtani if he offered everything. Five owners are worth less than him. 

The lack of a salary cap in baseball has been a beautiful thing at many points in baseball history. I actually think it’s part of what makes the game so great. If there’s nothing holding the Dodgers back, they should spend an unreasonable amount of money on a superteam. I don’t blame them. 

Unfortunately, this next baseball season will look unlike any other. The 2016 Golden State Warriors won 73 games and broke the single season wins record. The best player in the world joined their team and turned the NBA into the “let’s root for these guys to lose” league.

Baseball will be no different. Along with America, I’ll be rooting for the Dodgers to lose this year (only I’ve been doing it for a while now). The Dodgers have now won 100 games in four consecutive seasons. None of those four seasons saw a World Series, here’s hoping the 2024 season sees more of the same.