DON’T FORGET SHOHEI OHTANI’S THIRD EDGE: HE’S TURNING TEAMS INTO KLUTZES
Ask the Dodgers and Cubs how their pursuit of the supernatural wonder is going, after manager Dave Roberts spoke publicly about a meeting and Chicago decided an all-time free agent is much too costly
We view him as a two-headed behemoth and a mythical, double-edged creature. Don’t forget the third variable of Shohei Ohtani’s dominance. He is staring down at the chiefs of Major League Baseball — owning them, dawdling in free agency at his own mystery — and making the executives look silly.
He is Japanese. These men are American, mostly, growing up here when the game was king. From Babe Ruth to Barry Bonds, no one ever has commanded an audience of negotiators who’ve become isolated, forlorn onlookers at the winter meetings. As the most vigorous free agent in sports history, Ohtani will determine where he’ll sign the biggest contract in non-Messi annals when he most prefers, which could come in one hour or after Valentine’s Day.
I still say Los Angeles. He might say Toronto. For now, watch him reduce those free-spending Dodgers into finger-pointing, front-office politicians while making the Chicago Cubs look dull and cheap, refusing to pay $500 million-plus for his services when they’ve won one World Series in 114 years. A few other bosses are wondering why they entered the sweepstakes, though Ohtani’s abilities as a power hitter and governing pitcher are accompanied by a raging public aura and marketing riches that qualify him as a global commodity, not something Ronald Acuna Jr. or Corey Seager can say in their wildest dreams.
Baseball needs Shohei Ohtani more than Shohei Ohtani needs baseball. That remark never was stated until now. Will it ever be said again? His next destination — after six wasteful seasons in Anaheim, with a team that didn’t reach the playoffs — is the sport’s biggest offseason story since the Knickerbockers were terminated in 1857. And his cadre of CAA Sports handlers are certain to keep his priorities in play, including a secrecy demanding no team discuss meetings with him. To each his own, with owners in sports working in their own chilling seclusion, it’s grasped as part of the job when one must remain quiet on cue.
No one told Dave Roberts, who either tired of the grind as a postseason-miffed manager of the Dodgers or simply was being honest with fans. It’s not newsworthy that a major-market operation most willing to pay Ohtani would chat with him last week, for two to three hours. Despite the submerged weight of his privacy wishes, Roberts spoke freely about him in a media session. It was one thing to pull off a stolen base that ended the Curse of the Bambino. Was he losing it in real life?
“Yeah, we met with him,” he told the media in Nashville. “I like to be honest, so yeah, we met with Shohei. Clearly, Shohei is our top priority.”
As they say in the Asian media, sayonara. Why was Roberts talking at will? Did he not realize leaks could be held against the Dodgers? “I don’t feel like lying is something that I do,” he said. “I was asked a question, and to be forthright in this situation, we kept it quiet. But I think that it’s going to come out at some point that we met. So, I don't think myself or anyone in our organization would want to lie about it.”
What about his bosses — money men like Mark Walter and Todd Boehly, a potent local winner like Magic Johnson, a decades-long official like Stan Kasten, a frustrated October collapser like Andrew Friedman? Do they want Roberts babbling aloud when agent Nez Balelo, scrutinizing every whim and word, doesn’t like it?
“There's a respect of privacy, which I think we've done,” Roberts said. “There is a foundational integrity part of it, I feel, and not necessarily the gamesmanship part of it, which is still plausible and fair. For me, it's hard to get a pointed question and then give a false answer knowingly. So, I don't think it's disrespect to anybody in Shohei's party or on our side. I think that the details are going to be withheld, which I think they should be, but it's pretty clear he's a priority for us. I feel good about it. No one’s putting his foot to the fire, and he’ll make the decision when he and Nez and his camp feel appropriate. But again, you know, he’s his own man, which we all respect. He has a very good poker face. I think he was smiling inside.”
The meeting wasn’t a sales pitch, Roberts pointed out. “It was more of just sort of getting more familiar with him,’’ he said. “I think that he had questions for us, just trying to get more of the landscape. But being in this league for six years, he's got a pretty good idea of the Dodgers, what we're about, the city itself. I think it's pretty easy to have conversations with anyone if you feel comfortable in what you're about, who you work with. We're about people. We're about winning. So, I think that that's pretty easy to talk about. You know, there's no hiding of the ball, it's just kind of ‘here we are,’ and we really hope he feels it's a fit.’’
More people than Balelo were watching. Once his session was over, Roberts received a text message and quickly was gathered by Dodgers’ public-relations people. He’d been too forthright for the bosses. He was called out in December the way he’s called out by fans in the National League postseason. Friedman wouldn’t even comment if the team met with Ohtani. The manager?
“I was surprised. Dave made a comment,” general manager Brandon Gomes said. “For us personally, we don’t feel comfortable going into it any further.”
Asked if Roberts created a stinker of the Dodgers landing Ohtani, Gomes said in a comment that rocked the event: “I have no idea. I think this is all so personal, and, like I said, we’re not going to go into the free-agent world making comments. But it’s going to play out how it’s going to play out.”
This could be a sly way of expanding a $500 million offer to $600 million. A club screws up in the definitive process, it pays a bigger price. Or it could be Ohtani’s reminder he’ll have more to say about his next team — teammates, managers — than he ever employed with the Angels. Every other pursuer has played it cool in public, including the Blue Jays and San Francisco Giants. The Cubs, meanwhile, seem to have lapsed. According to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, quoting a “high-ranking Cubs official,” an organization run by Tom Ricketts has balked at Ohtani’s financial demand and bowed out.
As the one Chicago team not in the dregs of life, falling short of an NL wild-card berth, the Cubs can’t afford to be seen as stingy. Ricketts reshaped Wrigley Field and started his own TV network. Now, he’s cheap? This explains why Jed Hoyer, president of baseball operations, ran into Nightengale at the meetings and had harsh words for him. Was Hoyer the source who was burned by the writer?
“I don’t know where that came from. There’s nothing to report whatsoever,” said Hoyer, who might want to chat with Ricketts. “And I think on all the Ohtani stuff, just like I would with any free agent, I’m not going to talk about discussions or meetings or where it is. We’ll just keep that quiet like anything else.”
Or was Nightengale informed by his not-so-quiet informant? White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf has said a thousand times that he laughs at Ohtani’s wishes when he never has paid more than $75 million to a free agent — Andrew Benintendi — atop Chicago’s minor-league straggler. Why not tell the writer about the first-class team’s reluctance and make him call Hoyer or even Ricketts? And people wonder why that city’s teams are godawful.
Has the new Cubs manager, Craig Counsell, met with Ohtani?
“I have not,” he said.
How about front-office members?
“I have not,” Counsell said.
What I know is: I’ve never seen so many self-proclaimed geniuses brought down by one superhuman who’s nowhere near Nashville. Shohei Ohtani has no pen in his hand. Yet, in the end, his stillness is causing recklessness in baseball cities askew. If the Dodgers don’t sign him, who will manage them next season?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.